
















THOMAS CARLYLE 



3 *. 


The Western Series of English and 
American Classics / 


Carlyle’s Essay on Burns 

WITH 

SELECTIONS FROM THE POETRY 
OF ROBERT BURNS / 


Edited for School Use 
by 

Irene P. McKeehan 

Professor of English, University of Colorado 


HARLOW PUBLISHING CO. 
Oklahoma City 
1927 


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Copyright 1927 By 
HARLOW PUBLISHING CO. 


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CONTENTS 


Introduction 

I. Robert Burns_ i 

II. Thomas Carlyle - xv 

III. The Essay on Burns-xxi 

Biographical Notes ___xxviii 

Carlyle’s Essay on Burns_ 1 

Questions and Suggestions _ 94 

Suggestions to Teachers_103 

Selections from the Poetry of Robert Burns: 

The Cotter’s Saturday Night-105 

Tam O’ Shanter_ 112 

To a Mouse- 120 

To a Mountain Daisy- 122 

Poor Mailie’s Elegy- 124 

Ye Flowery Banks_ 126 

M’Pherson’s Farewell-127 

A Bard’s Epitaph- 128 

Scots, Wha Hae- 130 

My Wife’s a Winsome Wee Thing-131 

Of A’ the Airts_ 132 

John Anderson My Joe-133 

I Hae a Wife o’ My Ain--— 134 

Sweet Afton--—-- 135 

A Red, Red Rose—L—I'- 136 

Highland Mary_137 

Is There for Honest Poverty-139 

Ca’ the Yowes to the Knowes-140 

Glossary _ 143 




























ILLUSTRATIONS 


Thomas Carlyle ___Frontpiece 

Birthplace of Thomas Carlyle, Ecclefechan. xiv 

Robert Burns _xxxii 

Birthplace of Robert Burns, Alloway_ 104 





Carlyle’s Essay on Burns 



(By permission of The Perry Pictures Company, Malden, Massachusetts) 

ROBERT BURNS 






INTRODUCTION 

I 

ROBERT BURNS 

Robert Burns was born, January 25, 1759, at Allo- 
way, a little village on the banks of the Doon, near 
Ayr, the county town of Ayrshire, Scotland. The 
house of his birth, still standing close to the roadside, 
is a small, dark, clay cottage, without beauty or com¬ 
fort. His father, William Burnes or Burness—for 
Robert altered the spelling of his family name—was 
a gardener. His mother, whose maiden name had 
bemT^Agnes Brown, was the daughter of a tenant- 
farmer. Education was hard to get in those days, 
especially for women, and Mrs. Burnes could not sign 
her own name. She was a good woman, however, sen¬ 
sible, cheerful, and devoted to her husband and chil¬ 
dren, who repaid her devotion with respect and love. 
Burns’s father, by all accounts, was an extraordinary 
man, intelligent, sincerely religious, unfailingly hon¬ 
est. Carlyle, in his Heroes and Hero-Worship, calls 
him “brave, hard-toiling, hard-suffering,” and adds, 
“Burns’s schoolmaster came afterwards to London, 
learnt what good society was; but declares that in no 
meeting of men did he ever enjoy better discourse 
than at the hearth of this peasant.” The same man, 
Murdoch by name, said also that William Burnes was 
“by far the best of the human race he had ever 
known.” When we read, then, that Burns was “of 
lowly birth,” it is well to remember that he came of 
good stock and had every reason to be proud of his 
family. 

Unfortunately, circumstances were so unfavorable 
that all the industry and intelligence of William 
Burnes could not make a comfortable living for his 


11 


Carlyle's Essay on Burns 


wife and children. In 1766, he gave up his work as 
gardener and rented a farm at Mt. Oliphant, near 
Alloway, which he stocked by means of money bor¬ 
rowed from his landlord. The soil proved to be very 
poor; crops failed; the livestock died of disease. The 
landlord had been kind, but after his death, the agent 
or “factor,” into whose hands the estate fell, exacted 
every penny of rent and interest promptly under harsh 
threats of legal penalties. Robert was the eldest son, 
strong and large for his age, and he and the second 
brother, Gilbert, had to go to work much too early. 
By the time he was fifteen years old, the poet was 
“ploughman and principal laborer.” Held close to 
daily toil, bound down to the routine of the farm, with 
almost no society outside his own family, he said of his 
life at this time that it combined “the cheerless gloom 
of a hermit with the unceasing toil of a galley 
slave.” A move to another farm at Lochlea, near 
Tarbolton, when Robert was eighteen, improved things 
a little. Here there was, at least, some congeniality, 
and the Burns brothers mingled socially in the village 
life. At this place, William Burnes died in 1784. 

It is evident that in such a boyhood^of poverty and 
labor there was little opportunity for education. The 
brothers went irregularly and for short periods to the 
village school, which was taught at one time by the 
Mr. Mu rdoch who has been already referred to. This 
man took an interest in Robert, and when the latter 
was fourteen gave him a special course of lessons in 
English and French. At seventeen he stayed for 
three months with his mother’s family at Kirkoswald, 
where he studied geometry under a Mr. Rodgers. But 
the seven Burns children had the best part of their 
schooling at home, with their father_as schoolmaster, 
reading books with them and discussing what they 
read in the family circle. Before Burns became known 







A 


111 


v / Robert Burns 

\Y 

to the world, he had read more extensively and had 


a much wider knowledge of English literature than 
the average high school graduate of to-day can pre¬ 
tend to. 

When the future poet was twenty-three years old, 
he left home to work as a flax-dresser in the town of 
Irvine. Here he got into rather bad company, and 
entered on a career of what, for want of a better name, 
may be called dissipation. It is to be noted, however, 
that until he was twenty-five—that is, until after his 
father’s death—there was little in his conduct to be 
severely criticized. 

The event just mentioned marks a turning-point in 
Burns’s life. After settling up his father's financial 
affairs as best they could, Robert and Gilbert Burns 
took the lease of a farm called Mossgiel near the town 
of Mauchline. One of Burns’s recent biographers, D. 
McNaught, remarks, “Had Mossgiel been ten times 
the distance from the village of Mauchline that it 
really was the whole complexion of his after-life might 
have been different. To a man of his mental organi¬ 
zation a community of fellow mortals within a quarter 
of an hour’s walk from his dwelling was an attraction 
as irresistible as the action of the law of gravity. 
Every hour he could spare was spent in the village.” 
Some of his “fellow mortals” in Mauchline were, like 
his landlord and friend, Gavin Hamilton, men who 
could converse thoughtfully on intellectual subjects; 
too many of them were “rantin’, roarin’, ravin’ Bil¬ 
lies.” It should be remembered in Burns’s defense 
that hard drinking was customary in those days, that 
total abstainers were practically unheard of, that every 
man, especially every man in “good society,” was ex¬ 
pected to be drunk occasionally. We must also take 
into account his desire for sociability, his cramped and 
toilsome youth to which had been denied all relaxa- 


iv Carlyle's Essay on Burns 

tion, and a feeling of bitterness in his heart against 
the whole scheme of things that had made him, super¬ 
ior in gifts as he knew himself to be, a mere plough¬ 
man, the social Inferior of many obviously ordinary 
persons. Add to this the realization that some of the 
“unco guid and rigidly righteous” people of the town 
were really pretentious hypocrites, covering up their 
own sins and loudly blaming more open sinners like 
himself. All these things combined to drive Burns 
into opposition to the established morality and re¬ 
ligion of His neighborhood, though, remembering his 
father, he had always a profound respect for true 
piety. We can find excuses for his conduct, but the 
wreck that it made of his life is its sufficient con¬ 
demnation. 

In 1786, after a series of love affairs, he entered into 
an irregular, though legal, marriage with Jean Armour, 
the daughter of a mason at Mauchline. Rather on ac¬ 
count of Burns’s poverty than because of his bad repu¬ 
tation, Mr. Armour refused to countenance the mar¬ 
riage and destroyed the written proofs of it. Disgraced 
and miserable, threatened with imprisonment for debt, 
Burns now resolved to try his fortunes in the West 
Indies. He had secured a position as a bookkeeper 
on an estate in Jamaica and had engaged passage on 
a vessel when an event happened that opened up new 
prospects of success for him. 

This was the reception of the first edition of his 
poems, published at Kilmarnock in the summer of the 
same year. To explain this, we must go back a little. 
Robert Burns began composing verse at the age of six¬ 
teen, his first song having been made in honor of a 
young girl, his partner in the harvest-field. He did 
not write many or very good poems until after his 
twenty-third year, but from that time on until 1786, 
he turned out verses in great abundance and of very 


Robert Burns 


v 


good quality. As Carlyle says in his Essay, he wrote 
of things close at hand, of the men and women about 
him, of the daily experiences of his life. When his 
favorite ewe nearly died, he celebrated the event in 
Poor Mailie's Elegy; when his plough uprooted a 
daisy or ran through the nest of a field-mouse, he 
was moved with sympathy and wrote To a Mountain 
Daisy and To a Mouse; his reverence for his father 
and mother and their sincere religion found expression 
in The Cotter’s Saturday Night; into Halloween and 
The Jolly Beggars he introduced the rustic merry¬ 
makers and the rough frequenters of the tavern, just 
as he had known them in real life. 

These poems and many more like them, written in 
the Scotch dialect which he spoke himself, he passed 
around among his friends, who read and praised 
them. When, then, in 1786, he found himself in need 
of money to pay off his debts and provide for his 
passage across the Atlantic, he made up a volume of 
his verses and gave them to a printer named John 
Wilson in the neighboring town of Kilmarnock. Wilson 
agreed to print them on a venture, which turned out 
to be an astonishing success. Not only were the 612 
copies bought and read in Ayrshire, but the poet’s 
fame spread to other parts of Scotland. Mrs. Dunlop 
of Dunlop, an aristocratic lady of means in the 
neighborhood, bought a dozen copies and expressed 
her admiration in a letter to the poet, which was the 
beginning of a long-continued friendship. Above all, 
Dr. Blacklock, a noted literary man of Edinburgh, 
wrote to a friend of his, a clergyman, telling of the 
favorable reception of the book in the capital and urg¬ 
ing the unknown writer to come to the city himself 
and arrange for the publication of a second edition 
there. It was this letter which turned Burns back 


VI 


Carlyle’s Essay on Burns 


when he was already on his way to set sail from the 
port of Greenock bound for America. 

Instead of going to the West Indies, he went to 
Edinburgh. Carlyle in his Essay has so much to say 
about this visit to Edinburgh that it is hardly worth 
while to enlarge upon it here. It lasted through the 
greater part of the year 1787—though he spent sev¬ 
eral months of that year in a journey through various 
districts of Scotland—and he did not finally leave the 
city until March 24, 1788. During that period he had 
received much attention, had been treated as a social 
celebrity, and had made the acquaintance of many 
prominent men and women. The Edinburgh edition 
of his poems had been published and had netted the 
poet about £500, a good deal larger sum than the same 
amount would be at the present time. He realized, 
however, that he could not live by means of his liter¬ 
ary efforts, nor had he any desire to do so. As a 
“ploughman poet,” he was more an object of curiosity 
than of permanent interest to his city friends, who 
evidently made him feel that, much as they admired 
his verses, they did not regard him as their social 
equal. There seem to have been some notable ex¬ 
ceptions to this attitude of condescension, but on the 
whole that was the impression that he carried away 
with him. Who can wonder that it made him bitter? 

He saw that he must leave Edinburgh and adopt 
some permanent plan for earning his living. In those 
days in Scotland a very large number of articles in 
common use were subject to certain taxes called Excise 
duties, the men who collected which were called Excise¬ 
men. Such appointments were largely in the gift of 
influential noblemen and officers of the government, 
and some of Burns’s new friends secured him a po¬ 
sition as Exciseman in Dumfriesshire. Thinking 
that he could combine farming with the duties of his 


Robert Burns 


vii 


new office, he rented a farm which was known as Ellis- 
land, not far from the town of Dumfries. 

Before he moved to his new home, he made a loan 
to his brother Gilbert to save the farm at Mossgiel, 
settled part of his small capital on his mother, and 
formally acknowledged his earlier marriage to Jean 
Armour, by whom he already had several children. 
Husband, wife, and children settled down at Ellisland 
in June, 1788, and the “Excise and Farm Scheme/’ as 
Carlyle calls it, began to work. It proved to work 
very badly. His duties as Exciseman took up too 
much of his time and energy. He had to ride about 
the country on Horseback exposed to all sorts of 
weather, and as much of his official business consisted 
in hunting for smuggled whiskey and in testing or 
“gauging” ale and other liquors, he was constantly ex- 
posed totemptations very difficult for a man of his con¬ 
vivial nature to resist. He soon found that he could 
not attend to his farm, which proved a drain on his 
income. He has often been blamed for giving up his 
lease in 1791 and moving with his family to Dumfries, 
but from an economic point of view it was a sensible 
thing to do. He was much better off after the move 
than before. 

Rather too much has been made of Burns’s poverty 
during the latter part of his life. His salary and the 
various fees and profits attached to his office brought 
him an annual income of from £150 to £250 a year, 
which was quite enough in those days for a middle- 
class family to live respectably on. Though he was a 
man of extravagant tastes and of praiseworthy gen¬ 
erosity to his relatives and friends, he managed, as 
Carlyle says, to keep out of debt and left at his death 
more than £270 in money and personal property. 

It may be said that Burns’s dissipation in his clos¬ 
ing years at Dumfries and his social ostracism have 


viii 


Carlyle's Essay on Burns 


also been exaggerated, but unfortunately he cannot be 
cleared of the charge of having wasted a good deal of 
his noble genius in riotous living. He contributed 
numerous pieces to collections of Scottish songs by a 
man named Johnson and by George Thomson. For 
these songs he refused pay, regarding them as a labor 
of love and patriotism. Many of them are beautiful 
things. On the whole, however, he produced little or 
nothing in his last years to equal his earlier works. 
If his powers were failing, one can only say that in the 
middle thirties, a man’s powers ought to be at their 
highest. 

It is pleasant to turn from the contemplation of 
Burns’s weaknesses and shortcomings to record that 
in his home he was a most tender and devoted and in¬ 
telligent father. About six months before his death, 
the loss of his little daughter greatly afflicted him. 
His health had been poor for some time, and an at¬ 
tack of rheumatic fever left him very weak. But he 
wrote to a friend, “My physician assures me that 
melancholy and low spirits are half of my disease.” 
He died, July 21, 1796, a broken man at the age of 
thirty-seven. 

“His true life,” says Lord Rosebery, “began with 
his death; with the body passed all that was gross 
and impure; the clear spirit stood revealed, and soared 
at once to its accepted place among the fixed stars in 
the firmament of the rare immortals.” That accepted 
place is as the great national poet of Scotland. Scotch¬ 
men since have reverenced his memory and his poetry 
only “on this side idolatry.” Carlyle shares the en¬ 
thusiasm of his countrymen. 

One mistake, however, Carlyle makes in regarding 
Burns as unique, in not connecting him definitely 
enough with his literary forerunners. As has been 
said before, Burns was well read in English literature; 



Robert Burns 


ix 


naturally he was influenced by what he read. Addison, 
Pope, Gray, James Thomson, William Shenstone, and 
James Beattie were among his favorite authors. The 
Cotter's Saturday Night contains two quotations 
from Pope, and is full of reminiscences of Gray’s 
Elegy in a Country Churchyard. But more important 
than Burns’s relations to these writers in literary 
English was his indebtedness to earlier Scottish poets. 
For about a century before Burns there had been con¬ 
siderable interest in the production of poetry in the 
Scottish vernacular, that is, in the spoken dialect of 
the people, which differed in many respects from 
standard English. Most of the writers of this poetry 
were comparatively insignificant, but some of their 
poems were well worth preserving, and many of their 
songs were extraordinarily good. 

The best-known poets among Burns’s predecessors 
were Allan Ramsay and Robert Fergusson, twice men¬ 
tioned in the Essay on Burns. The former had a con¬ 
siderable reputation in England as well as in Scot¬ 
land. By collecting and printing a large number of 
Scottish songs and ballads, he not only preserved 
many poems that without his aid might have been 
lost, but also helped to create a taste for the vernac¬ 
ular poetry which undoubtedly prepared the way for 
the public appreciation of Burns. Fergusson, who 
was only nine years older than Burns and who died 
when he was twenty-four, had a good deal more ability 
than Carlyle seems to think. Burns, in his Preface 
to the First or Kilmarnock Edition of his poems, pub¬ 
lished in 1786, underestimated his own superiority 
to these two poets, but stated clearly and sufficiently 
his indebtedness to them: “But to the genius of a 
Ramsay, or the glorious dawnings of the poor un¬ 
fortunate Fergusson, he [the author], with equal un¬ 
affected sincerity, declares, that even in his highest 


X 


Carlyle’s Essay on Burns 


pulse of vanity, he has not the most distant preten¬ 
sions. These two justly admired Scotch poets he has 
often had in his eye in the following pieces; but 
rather with a view to kindle at their flame, than for 
servile imitation.” 

Burns, then, was not a great beginner or originator, 
but rather the culmination and climax of a line of 
poets who dealt with similar themes in similar ways. 
An instance of his relation to his predecessors may be 
found in the stanza-form used not only for Poor 
Mailie’s Elegy, To a Mouse, To a Mountain Daisy, 
and A Bard’s Epitaph, but for many others of Burns’s 
poems. So much did Burns write in this form that it 
has been named the “Burns Stanza”; but, as a matter 
of fact, it was one of the favorite stanzas of Scottish 
poets before him. Burns has received more notice 
than these other poets, principally, of course, because 
he was a man of much greater genius; but also be¬ 
cause he came at a time when readers were hungry 
for just the kind of poetry he offered them. 

During the early years of the eighteenth century, 
English poetry was characterized by good sense, in¬ 
telligence, and restraint; it dealt with moral themes, 
with criticisms of society, with town life; it was 
artificial, unemotional, unmusical. Pope is its leading 
exponent. Gradually as the century went on, dissat¬ 
isfaction with this kind of poetry began to show itself 
in various ways. James Thomson in his Seasons 
turned away from the town and wrote about the fields 
and woods, the broad landscapes of the country. 
Thomas Gray in his Elegy in a Country Churchyard 
appealed to fundamental human emotions. Bishop 
Percy in his Reliques of Ancient English Poetrie col¬ 
lected and published many of the old ballads, which 
were not artificial and restrained, but natural and 
passionate. The latter part of the eighteenth century, 


Robert Burns 


xi 


having become sentimental and romantic, wanted sen¬ 
timental and romantic poetry; it wanted to “return 
to nature.” Burns, when he came, gave it the sort of 
poetry that it had been craving; hence the enthusiasm 
with which he was received. 

Carlyle analyzes Burns’s poetry with considerable 
insight, but his analysis is not entirely systematic. We 
discover in Burns the following characteristics: (1) 
an exquisitely lyrical, that is, musical, quality; (2) 
a sincere feeling for nature; (3) an enthusiasm for 
humanity and the common man; (4) subject-matter 
dealing largely with rural life; (5) sympathy and 
tenderness; (6) romantic love; (7) natural and simple 
diction. These, with the possible exception of the 
last, are generally regarded as characteristics of the 
romantki movement, of which movement Burns was un¬ 
questionably a part. His influence on Wordsworth 
was acknowledged definitely by that poet. Carlyle, 
being an essentially romantic critic, is attracted by 
these qualities. 

But there is something else in Burns besides the 
romantic elements. His humor, which Carlyle notes 
and admires, is by no means a trait of romanticism. 
Typical romantic poets, like Wordsworth and Shelley, 
are notably deficient in humor. Burns is a realist as 
well as a romanticist. Wordsworth idealized rural 
human nature; Burns saw it as it really was. It is 
a real peasant household of the better type that he 
presents in The Cotter's Saturday Night; it is a real 
peasant of a worse type that he presents in Tam o' 
Shanter. In dealing with nature also, he is rather 
realistic than romantic. As a farmer, he is intimately 
in contact with it; as a keen observer, he sees it viv¬ 
idly and interestedly. But it never occurs to him to 
love it in the abstract, to philosophize about its in¬ 
fluence on the soul of man, or even to describe it much 


Xll 


Carlyle's Essay on Burns 


except as a background for the human nature in which 
he is primarily interested. He is almost unique among 
English poets in his attitude toward animals. The 
sentimental poets, his contemporaries, were often much 
concerned about the humane treatment of animals. 
Burns has few theories on the subject; he simply 
talks to them and feels towards them as if they were 
human beings. 

In one respect Burns belongs to the preceding age 
rather than to the Romantic Period which was just 
beginning. Like the earlier eighteenth-century poets, 
he was a master of satire. Limits of space and the 
nature of the subject-matter of Burns’s satiric poems 
prevent any illustration of them in this book. Carlyle, 
who was not much interested in the form, has little 
to say about them, but they should not be overlooked. 

The fact that Burns’s best poems are written in the 
dialect of his native land instead of in literary English 
has been somewhat of a handicap to their appreciation 
among those who are puzzled by the peculiarities of 
the language. Even with this handicap many of 
Burns’s songs have become popular throughout the 
English-speaking world, and in his own field the best 
critics have always placed him high. 

The following quotation from a distinguished 
American scholar, Professor Alphonso G. Newcomer, 
shows him in substantial agreement with Carlyle as 
to the real excellence of Burns’s work: 

“Burns’s essential originality is not for a moment to 
be questioned. He went straight to native sources,— 
to no Arcadian vale or Heliconian fount, but to Tar- 
bolton and Mauchline, to the Lugar and the Cessnock. 
It is not in imagination alone that he sits by the 
ingle-cheek and eyes the upward curling smoke, not 
in a poem alone that the farmer salutes his old mare 
Maggie on a New Year’s morning. We know that 
Holy Willie’s name was really Willie; that the Tar* 


Robert Burns 


xiii 


bolton lassies lived there in the neighborhood, just 
as they are described; that Luath was his own dog; 
that it was an actual mouse, turned out of her nest 
by the plowshare, that he immortalized in pathetic 
rhyme. In a word, Burns was wholly natural, and 
the want of naturalness was the particular curse under 
which poetry had too long labored. . . And in the 
next and last place, Burns was wholly lyrical—a 
heaven-gifted, spontaneous, irrepressible singer. 
Every scene of his life and every feeling of his heart 
turned to song on his lips. Words marshaled them¬ 
selves into tuneful measures, and rhymes came troop¬ 
ing at call . . . Greater poets England has had in 
number—she has had no more perfect singer.” 


XIV 


Carlyle's Essay on Burns 



(From a 'Thompson Print) 

BIRTHPLACE OF THOMAS CARLYLE, ECCLEFECHAN 






II 

THOMAS CARLYLE 


Few persons from birth and training were so well 
qualified as Carlyle to understand Burns. The cir¬ 
cumstances of their early life were amazingly similar. 
On December 4, 1795, Thomas Carlyle was born in the 
village of Ecclefechan, less than fifteen miles from 
Dumfries, where Burns was then living and where 
eight months later he died. The house of James Car¬ 
lyle, stone-mason, was only a little better than the 
dark, small, undecorated clay cottage of William 
Burnes, market-gardener, in Alloway. The poverty 
and piety, the “plain living and high thinking,” of 
the two households almost exactly corresponded. Car¬ 
lyle’s mother was, like Burns’s, an uneducated, devout, 
and noble-minded woman, to whom her children were 
devoted. Though she could read, it was only in later 
years that she learned to write in order to commu¬ 
nicate with her sons when they were, away from home; 
but writing always remained for her a laborious busi¬ 
ness. As to James Carlyle, the father, there can be 
little doubt that, when Carlyle writes so feelingly of 
Burns’s father (Tf41), he is thinking of his own. They 
were men of the same stamp. Carlyle wrote of his 
father after the latter’s death, “The force that had 
been lent my father he honourably expended in manful 
well doing. A portion of this planet bears beneficent 
traces of his strong hand and strong heart. Nothing 
that he undertook to do but he did it faithfully and 
like a true man. . . I owe him much more than ex¬ 
istence, I owe him a noble, inspiring example (now 
\that I can read it in that rustic character). It was he 
exclusively that determined on educating me; that 
from his small hard-earned funds sent me to school 


xvi 


Carlyle's Essay on Burns 


and college, and made me whatever I am or may be¬ 
come. Let me not mourn for my father, let me do 
worthily of him.” In another place he said, “I have a 
sacred pride in my peasant father, and would not ex¬ 
change him, even now, for any king known to me.” 

In the longer quotation just given may be noted the 
principal difference between Carlyle’s early life and 
that of Burns: the education which the former had 
and the latter had not. The family at Ecclefechan 
had just that “little” of added prosperity which Car¬ 
lyle desired for the Burns household (1141), and which 
would have enabled “the boy Robert” to go to school, 
to ‘struggle forward, as so many weaker men do, to 
some university.’ When James Carlyle determined to 
make the necessary sacrifices to send his promising 
son, Thomas, away to school, a neighbor advised him 
not to do so, saying, “Educate a boy, and he grows up 
to despise his ignorant parents.” Long afterwards, 
the father told this to his son and added, “Thou hast 
not done so, God be thanked for it.” 

Thomas was sent to school at Annan, not far from 
Ecclefechan, and later to the University of Edinburgh. 
He and a companion walked all the way to the city, 
more than sixty miles. His parents had hoped that 
he would become a minister, but he did not feel him¬ 
self qualified for such work. Instead, when he left 
the university, he began to earn his own living as a 
teacher of mathematics. After a few years, however, 
he gave up teaching and went back to Edinburgh with 
rather indefinite notions of earning his living with 
his pen. While he was waiting to find congenial work, 
he lived principally on oatmeal sent from home. His 
scanty diet and irregular meals at this time left him 
a prey to chronic indigestion for the rest of his life. 
For a number of years he barely kept his head above 
water by making translations from the German, by 


Thomas Carlyle 


XVII 


writing articles on German literature and other sub¬ 
jects for the magazines, and by employment as a tutor 
in a private family. 

In 1826, he married a very intelligent and attractive 
young woman named Jane Welsh. Her father had 
been a surgeon and had left to his daughter a small 
estate; which, however, upon her marriage, she deeded 
over to her mother. This act was characteristic of 
the sturdy independence with which Carlyle and his 
wife faced the world. For a short time they set up 
housekeeping in an Edinburgh suburb, but in 1828 
they took up their residence on a desolata moorland 
farm called Craigenputtock, where they could live with 
the utmost economy and where Carlyle could have the 
quiet that he found necessary for his work. Here the 
Essay on Burns was written as well as the later mas¬ 
terpiece, Sartor Resartus, and here Emerson came to 
visit them and formed a life-long friendship with his 
host. 

It is during the crisis of the six hard years at 
Craigenputtock that the fundamental difference in 
character between Carlyle and Burns manifests itself. 
When we read in the Essay that Burns’s “true load¬ 
star” should have been “a life of Poetry, with Poverty, 
nay, with Famine if it must be so,” we must remem¬ 
ber that Carlyle is speaking out of the very midst of 
his own experience of a very similar life. When he 
wrote thus, the issue of his own struggle was still 
doubtful. He was determined to make his own way 
in the world, to find the work that he was best fitted 
for, and to do that work and no other. With the aid 
of his loyal wife he fought through a long series of 
difficulties and won finally a full measure of success 
and recognition. In comparing him with Burns at 
this point it may be said in partial excuse of the 
latter that Carlyle had no such passions and tempta- 


xviii Carlyle's Essay on Burns 

tions to contend with in his own nature as had the 
poet. 

In 1834, when Carlyle, shortly after the publication 
of his first book, Sartor Resartus, went up to London, 
he was a year older than Burns was when the latter 
died. In London he lived for the rest of his life, at 
a now famous house in Cheyne Row, Chelsea. Sartor 
Resartus , which means “the tailor re-tailored,” is as 
unusual as its title. It claims to be the life-story of 
a German scholar, who invented a new philosophy 
called the “philosophy of clothes.” The German schol¬ 
ar is entirely fictitious, but many of the details about 
him are really true of Carlyle himself. The book is 
a veiled spiritual autobiography, difficult to under¬ 
stand, but for those who can read it intelligently a 
beautiful and inspiring work. 

Between 1834 and 1881, the date of his death, Car¬ 
lyle produced a great many works. It would hardly 
be profitable to enumerate them all. Heroes and Hero 
Worship is a series of lectures on great men; in the 
fifth of these, Burns is dealt with again. Carlyle 
became famous as a historian and biographer through 
his History of the French Revolution and his lives of 
Oliver Cromwell and Frederick the Great. Past and 
Present and Latter-Day Pamphlets are severe criti¬ 
cisms of his own time; they might almost be called 
sermons addressed to the English people on what he 
called the “condition-of-England question.” 

In fact, though Carlyle disappointed his father and 
mother by not entering the ministry, he became in 
his later life a real preacher through his writings, and 
he greatly influenced the thought of the world by con¬ 
stantly hammering on certain ideas that he regarded 
as fundamental. The most valuable of these ideas and 
some of Carlyle’s characteristic ways of expressing 
them follow: 


Thomas Carlyle 


xix 


I. The basic importance of religion, not of any 
particular religion, but of a religious attitude toward 
life. In Heroes and Hero Worship, he writes, “It is 
well said, in every sense, that a man’s religion is the 
chief fact with regard to him. A man’s, or a nation 
of men’s. By religion I do not mean here the church- 
creed which he professes, the articles of faith which 
he will sign and, in words or otherwise, assert; not 
this wholly, in many cases not this at all. . . But the 
thing a man does practically believe (and this is often 
enough without asserting it even to himself, much 
less to others) ; the thing a man does practically lay 
to heart, and know for certain, concerning his vital 
relations to this mysterious Universe, and his duty 
and destiny there, that is in all cases the primary 
thing for him, and creatively determines all the rest.” 

II. The Gospel of Work. He expresses this in 
many places, but perhaps best in various sentences 
scattered through Past and Present : “Blessed is he 
who has found his work; let him ask no other blessed¬ 
ness. . . Older than all preached Gospels was this un¬ 
preached, inarticulate, but ineradicable, forever-endur¬ 
ing Gospel: Work, and therein have well-being . . . 
All true Work is sacred; in all true Work, were it but 
true hand-labour, there is something of divineness. 
Labour, wide as the Earth, has its summit in Heaven.” 

III. The emphatic rejection of the idea that hap¬ 
piness is the main aim of human life, and the setting 
up of duty and service in its place. In Sartor Resartus 
we find these words: “Has the word Duty no mean¬ 
ing; is what we call Duty no divine Messenger and 
Guide. . . ? Happiness of an approving Conscience! 
. . . there is in man a higher than Love of Happi¬ 
ness : he can do without Happiness, and instead there¬ 
of find Blessedness! . . . Love not Pleasure; love God. 


XX 


Carlyle's Essay on Burns 


This is the everlasting yea, wherein all contradic¬ 
tion is solved.” 

IV. The proper attitude of reverence and obedience 
toward great men. These great men he called “He¬ 
roes” and the proper attitude toward them “Hero 
Worship.” This he defines in the book so named: 
“Worship of a Hero is transcendent admiration of a 
Great Man. I say great men are still admirable; I 
say there is, at bottom, nothing else admirable! No 
nobler feeling than this of admiration for one higher 
than himself dwells in the breast of man . . . Society 
is founded on Hero-worship . . . The most significant 
feature in the history of an epoch is the manner it 
has of welcoming a Great Man.” 


Ill 

THE ESSAY ON BURNS 

Carlyle’s Essay on Burns first appeared in the Ed¬ 
inburgh Review in 1828, ostensibly as a review of a 
recently published Life of Robert Burns by John Gib¬ 
son Lockhart. Lockhart, Sir Walter Scott’s son-in-law, 
is chiefly remembered now for his Life of Scott, 
(1838) , one of the best biographies ever written. His 
Life of Burns was a much smaller work, both in size 
and in importance, though it was, as Carlyle indicates, 
the most satisfactory study of the poet produced up 
to that time. 

Carlyle was more interested in Burns than he was 
in anything that Lockhart had written about Burns, 
and it has been customary to say that after the brief, 
perfunctory discussion in the first four paragraphs, 
he drops all consideration of Lockhart’s book, except 
for the three rather long quotations later, one at sec¬ 
ond-hand from Sir Walter Scott. This statement, true 
in a way, is misleading. Every fact of Burns’s life 
which Carlyle mentions, every reference that he makes 
to the poet’s own words or to the opinions of others 
about him, is taken directly from Lockhart. Not only 
so, but practically all the topics discussed in the Essay 
owe their suggestion, in one way or another, to Lock¬ 
hart’s book. This is not to imply that Carlyle is not 
original; he is. But he is more indebted to Lockhart 
than has been generally recognized. 

To show this indebtedness in detail would take a 
long time. A few examples will suffice. 

(1) In paragraph 30 of the Essay, Carlyle in dis¬ 
cussing Tam o’ Shanter is answering Lockhart, who 
says, “To the last, Burns was of opinion that Tam o’ 
Shanter was the best of his productions; and ... I 


xxii Carlyle's Essay on Burns 

believe the decision has been all but unanimously ap¬ 
proved of . . . No poet, with the exception of SnaKes- 
peare, ever possessed the power of exciting the most 
varied and discordant emotions with such rapid tran¬ 
sitions.” Note what Carlyle says about “Shakspear- 
ean” qualities. 

(2) Lockhart praises The Jolly Beggars almost as 
emphatically as does Carlyle in Paragraph 31: “I know 
nothing but the Tam o’ Shanter that is calculated to 
convey so high an impression of what Burns might 
have done . . .Beggar’s Bush and Beggar’s Opera sink 
into tameness in the comparison.” Note Carlyle's 
reference to this statement. 

(3) In paragraphs 34 and 35 Carlyle deals with 
“Burns’s influence ... as exerted specially on the 
Literature of his country, at least on the Literature of 
Scotland.” Lockhart devotes three pages (pp. 316- 
318 in the Edinburgh edition of 1830) to the influence 
of Burns “in reviving and strengthening the national 
feelings of his countrymen.” The details of the two 
discussions differ. 

(4) In paragraph 46 Carlyle writes, “Certain of 
his [Burns’s] admirers have felt scandalized at his ever 
resolving to gauge.” This was probably suggested by 
Lockhart’s question, “Who can open the pages of 
Burns, and remember without a blush, that the author 
of such verses, tjie human being whose breast glowed 
with such feelings, was doomed to earn mere bread for 
his children by casting up the stock of publicans’ cel¬ 
lars and riding over moors and mosses in quest of 
smuggling stills?” Lockhart, however, is scandalized 
at the public, who should have prevented him from be¬ 
coming “a common gauger,” rather than at Burns’s 
resolve to support his family in this way. 

(5) Carlyle’s entire discussion in paragraph 54 is 
aimed at a “class of Burns’s admirers, who accuse the 


The Essay on Burns 


xxiii 


higher ranks among us of having ruined Burns by 
their selfish neglect of him. ,, This accusation is im¬ 
plied in several passages of Lockhart’s biography. 

(6) The elaborate comparison which Carlyle makes 
between Burns and Byron in paragraphs 63 and 64 
was undoubtedly suggested to him by Lockhart’s brief 
reference to the resemblance between the two poets 
“on many points,” specifically in their attitude towards 
religion. 

This study of the relation between the Essay and the 
book which occasioned it might be continued to consid¬ 
erable length, but enough has been said to show that 
the connection is closer than has usually been recog¬ 
nized. Still the main values of the Essay are entirely 
independent of its ostensible purpose as a review of 
Lockhart’s biography. 

These main values may be analyzed somewhat as 
follows: 

1. The most obvious is that Carlyle’s estimate of 
Burns as a man and as a poet is worth getting and un¬ 
derstanding. That Carlyle from his birth and train¬ 
ing was peculiarly fitted to make such an estimate has 
already been indicated. If anybody could appreciate 
Burns’s difficulties and the qualities of his work, he 
could. People have taken a great interest in Burns 
and have been much puzzled about him. They have 
asked many questions: Was he really a great poet? 
If so, why? How far was his life a failure? What 
was the cause of that failure? Was it his fault? Or 
was he an innocent victim of circumstances? Or was 
the public of the time definitely to blame? All these 
questions Carlyle answers, and the Essay is worth 
reading, to find out how he answers them. 

2. It has been claimed by a number of superior 
critics that Carlyle was the greatest man of letters in 
England during the middle years of the nineteenth 


XXIV 


Carlyle’s Essay on Burns 


century. Certainly he was one of the greatest. For 
a student it is interesting to know what such a man 
thought about literature. What, according to Carlyle, 
is the proper subject-matter to write about? What 
are the greatest and most desirable qualities in liter¬ 
ary work? The answers to these questions can be 
found in the Essay on Burns. 

3. Professor Dawson in his Literary Leaders of 
Modern England says of Carlyle, “His mind was also 
one of the most fertile of minds; not so much in the 
matter of industrious production as in the much rarer 
function of begetting great seminal ideas, which re¬ 
produced themselves over the entire area of modern 
literature.” Seminal ideas are ideas that act like 
seeds, so that planted in other minds they grow and 
produce more ideas. Many thinking men and women 
alive to-day think as they do because Carlyle thought 
and wrote as he did, though they may never have read 
any of Carlyle’s works. His influence hasl)een passed 
on from mind to mind, so that his philosophy is still a 
power in the world. That philosophy is set forth in 
Sartor Resartus, in Past and Present, and in Heroes 
and Hero Worship, more completely than in the Essay 
on Burns, but those three books are much longer, and 
the first two are very difficult reading. The student 
who approaches Carlyle for the first time can find in 
the Essay some of its author’s most significant ideas. 
If he reads carefully, he will be able to answer this 
question: What did Carlyle regard as the most im¬ 
portant things in life? 

4. Not only was Carlyle a great thinker, but he 
was also a great writer of English prose. W. C. 
Brownell in his Victorian Prose Masters says of him: 
“In expression . . . perhaps prose has not had a greater 
master. He could say anything he wanted to and with 
extraordinary energy.” In some of his books, espee- 


The Essay on Burns 


xxv 


ially in those produced during his later years, the pe¬ 
culiarities of his style are so marked as to be rather 
a barrier to the expression of his thought. These 
peculiarities consist in (1) an unusual use of capitals 
for the purpose of emphasis, (2) an abundance of ex¬ 
clamations and questions directly addressed to the 
reader, (3) incomplete constructions and fragmentary 
sentences, (4) inventions of compound words, (5) for¬ 
eign words and words in peculiar senses, (6) the use 
of stock phrases and nick-names. In the Essay on 
Burns these peculiarities are not much in evidence, 
but some instances of them may be found. 

On the whole, the style of the Essay is exceedingly 
good. To be noticed especially are Carlyle’s very vivid 
and picturesque figures of speech; these are not orna¬ 
ments laid on from the outside, but are sum and sub¬ 
stance of his thought, not to be disentangled from the 
thought without destroying it. Note, for example, 
how figure after figure appears in paragraph 44: “The 
conduct of Burns under this dazzling blaze of favour; 
... In his unexampled situation the young peasant is 
not a moment perplexed; so many strange lights do not 
confuse him, do not lead him astray . . . He had seen 
the gay and the gorgeous arena, in which the powerful 
are born to play their parts; . . . and he felt more bit¬ 
terly than ever, that here he was but a looker-on, and 
had no part or lot in that splendid game . . . But so it 
is with many men: We ' long for the merchandise, yet 
would fain keep the price'; and so stand chaffering 
with Fate, in vexatious altercation, till the night come, 
and our fair is over!” When one reads such passages, 
one remembers what Carlyle wrote about his father: 
“None of us will ever forget that bold glowing style 
of his, flowing free from his untutored soul, full of 
metaphors (though he knew not what a metaphor was) 
with all manner of potent words which he appropriated 


xxvi 


Carlyle’s Essay on Burns 


and applied with a surprising accuracy.” It was from 
old James Carlyle, the stonemason, that his gifted son 
got his figurative style. It would be an unprofitable 
waste of time to pick out and identify all Carlyle’s 
figures of speech, but it would be a pity not to recog¬ 
nize how much they add of effectiveness and beauty; 
they are like a running commentary of pictures in the 
margin. 

The Essay on Burns is full of quotations. Some of 
these are from Lockhart, some from Burns himself, 
some from sources not given and in many cases dif¬ 
ficult to recognize. Carlyle was scrupulous in his use 
of quotation marks; whenever he suspected that a 
phrase was derived from something he had read he 
enclosed it in quotes, even though he might be alter¬ 
ing the wording so much as to make it really his own. 
He wrote from a wide background of reading and out 
of a full mind. The reader who comes to the Essay 
with a very limited background will not always un¬ 
derstand or appreciate Carlyle’s allusions to great 
names or his use of memorable phrases, but for the 
experienced these constitute part of the charm. Most 
important of all books in the making of Carlyle’s style 
was the Bible. The Bible was the book in the house- 
household of a Scotch peasant in those days, and 
Thomas Carlyle and Robert Burns were alike familiar 
with it. Entirely apart from its religious significance, 
the English Bible in what is known as the Authorized 
Version has been of great importance in moulding the 
language of many of our great writers; no better Eng¬ 
lish can be found anywhere. Carlyle was saturated 
with it. He uses its phrases freely and often alludes 
to its stories. Attention will be caHed in ’the notes 
to the most noteworthy of these references, but the 
influence of the Bible on the diction and cadence of 


The Essay on Burns 


xxvii 


Carlyle’s sentences cannot be measured by tRe number 
of biblical allusions to be found in the text. 

The Essay on Burns is unquestionably harder to 
read than a short story or a simple poem or a novel 
would be. It contains, however, no great difficulties, 
and whatever labor is involved in mastering it ought 
to be well repaid by acquiring and understanding its 
ideas. If we never read anything that demands in¬ 
tellectual exercise, our minds will be as soft as the 
teeth of those people who live only on mush and 
sugar. To the intelligent and mentally active student, 
a book with real ideas in it like the Essay on Burns 
offers a genuine enlargement of life. 


BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES 

The text of this edition of the Essay on Burns is that of 
the second London edition of 1842, containing Carlyle’s re¬ 
visions and additions; a few obvious misprints have been 
corrected from the original Edinburgh Review edition. The 
punctuation, apparently Carlyle’s own, is rather peculiar; 
its chief regular differences from present-day usage consist 
in the use of commas to set off restrictive adjective clauses 
and noun clauses in the predicate. 

References to Lockhart’s Life of Burns are to the third 
edition, Edinburgh, 1830; a more accessible edition of Lock¬ 
hart’s Life is in the Everyman's Library. Perhaps the best 
recent biography of Burns is The Truth about Bums, by D. 
McNaught, Glasgow, 1921. Further interesting material on 
Burns may be found in Robert Burns, How to Know Him, 
by William Allan Neilson, Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1917; The 
Ayrshire Homes and Haunts of Burns, by Henry C. Shelley, 
Putnam’s, 1897; The Correspondence of Robert Burns and 
Mrs. Frances Dunlop, edited by William Wallace, 2 vols., 
N. Y., 1898; Robert Burns, by Sir George Douglas and W. S. 
Crockett, London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1904; Familiar 
Studies of Men and Books, by Robert Louis Stevenson, 
Scribner’s, 1891, pp. 59-103, “Some Aspects of Robert 
Burns’’; A Survey of English Literature, 1780-1880, 4 vols., 
by Oliver Elton, Macmillan, 1912-20, Vol. I, Chap. IV, 
“Robert Burns”; Cambridge History of English Literature, 
Vol. XI, “Burns and Lesser Scottish Verse,” by T. F. Hen¬ 
derson. Of considerable interest is John Drinkwater’s 
play, Robert Burns, Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1925. 

Those interested in Burns’s forerunners may pursue the 
subject further in Scottish Vernacular Literature, by T. F. 
Henderson, London, 1898. Many of the beautiful songs and 
ballads that constituted a great part of Burns’s intellectual 
nourishment are printed in the Edinburgh Book of Scottish 
Verse. 

Books and articles about Carlyle are bewildering in their 
number and variety. The standard biographies are those 
by John Nichol in the English Men of Letters Series, Harper, 
1892, and by Richard Garnett, London. W. Scott, 1897. A 


Bibliographical Notes 


xxix 


monumental biography by David A. Wilson is in, process of 
publication by Dutton, four large volumes having already 
appeared: Carlyle till Marriage, 1923; Carlyle to the 
French Revolution, 1924; Carlyle on Cromwell and Others, 
1925; Carlyle at his zenith, 1927. These volumes are 
full of picturesque anecdotes and human touches; 
the first especially contains much that would be 

of interest to. young readers. Other useful books 
are the following: Thomas Carlyle, How to Know Him, 
by Bliss Perry, Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1915; In Cheyne Walk 
and Thereabout, by Reginald Blunt, Lippincott, 1914; Vic¬ 
torian Prose Masters, by W. C. Brownell, Scribner’s, 1901, 
pp. 49-96; Obiter Dicta, Series One, by Augustine Birrell, 
Scribner’s, 1897, pp. 1-54 (also in Collected Essays and Ad- 
resses, Dent, 1922, Vol. 2, pp. 29-55) ; Makers of Modern 
Prose, by W. J. Dawson, Whittaker, 1899, pp. 169-207; 
Varied Types, by G. K. Chesterton, Dodd, Mead and Co., 
1903, pp. 109-23; Literature in a Changing Age, A. H. Thorn¬ 
dike, Macmillan, 1920, pp. 70-93; A Survey of English 
Literature, 1780-1880, by Oliver Elton, Vol. Ill, Chap. II: 
Cambridge History of English Literature, Yol. XIII, Chap. 
I. “Carlyle,” by J. G. Robertson. Of very special interest 
to young readers are the introductory essay in Thomas 
Wentworth Higginson’s Carlyle's Laugh and Other Sur¬ 
prises, Houghton., Mifflin and Co., 1909, and John Bur¬ 
roughs’s three essays on Carlyle, “In Carlyle’s Country,” *A 
Sunday in Cheyne Row,” and “Dr. Johnson and Carlyle,” 
the first two in Fresh Fields, Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 
1894, the third in Indoor Studies, Houghton, Mifflin and Co.. 
1889. A recent very valuable book, Carlyle and Mill, by 
Emery E. Neff, Columbia University Press, 1924, is probably 
beyond the intelligence of most high-school students. Nine 
volumes of Carlyle’s letters have been published under 
various titles; any of these are worth reading or dipping 
into, but perhaps the most intrinsically interesting are 
The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo 
Emerson, edited by C. E. Norton, 2 vols., Boston, 1883. 
Carlyle's Reminiscences, edited by James Anthony Froude, 
1881, though its publication was a betrayal of confidence on 


XXX 


Carlyle’s Essay on Burns 


the part of the editor, has much that is worth while in it, 
especially Carlyle’s account of his father. 


Note: Proper names not explained in the foot-notes may 
be found in the Glossary, to which have been relegated two 
classes of names: (1) those which the more intelligent of 
the class may be expected to know; (2) those which it is 
not necessary to understand in order to get the fundamental 
meaning of the text. 





Barns 

1. In the modern arrangements of society, it is no 
uncommon thing that a man of genius must, like But¬ 
ler, ‘ask for bread and receive a stone’; 1 for, in spite 
of our grand maxim of supply and demand, 2 3 it is by no 
means the highest excellence that men are most for¬ 
ward to recognise. The inventor of a spinning-jenny 
is pretty sure of his reward in his own day; 2 but the 
writer of a true poem, like the apostle of a true re¬ 
ligion, is nearly as sure of the contrary. We do not 
know whether it is not an aggravation of the injus¬ 
tice, that there is generally a posthumous retribution. 
Robert Burns, in the course of Nature, might yet have 
been living; but his short life was spent in toil and 
penury; and he died, in the prime of his manhood, 
miserable and neglected; and yet already a brave 
mausoleum shines over his dust, and more than one 
splendid monument has been reared in other places 
to his fame: the street where he languished in poverty 
is called by his name; the highest personages in our 
literature have been proud to appear as his commen¬ 
tators and admirers, and here is the sixth narrative 
of his Life that has been given to the world! 

2. Mr. Lockhart thinks it necessary to apologise 
for this new attempt on such a subject: but his read- 

'Matthew VII, 9. Not exactly quoted; Carlyle quotes 
from memory, and is seldom strictly accurate. 

2 The fundamental principle in political economy, that 
what is scarcest and most useful will receive the highest 
price. As men of genius are rare and of great value, they 
ought to be highly paid, but are not. Carlyle was very 
scornful of political economy. 

3 James Hargreaves, an English weaver, who died in 1778, 
invented a machine for spinning cotton, which he named the 
“spinning-jenny” after his wife. As a matter of fact, he 
was not adequately rewarded, but remained a poor man. 



2 


Carlyle's Essay on Burns 


ers, we believe, will readily acquit him; or, at worst, 
will censor only the performance of his task, not the 
choice of it. The character of Burns, indeed, is a 
theme that cannot easily become either trite or ex¬ 
hausted ; and will probably gain rather than lose in its 
dimensions by. the ^distance to which it is removed by 
Time. No man, it has been said, is a hero to his valet: 
and this is probably true; but the fault is at least as 
likely to be the valet’s as the hero’s. For it is certain, 
that to the vulgar eye few things are wonderful that 
are not distant. It is difficult for men to believe that 
the man, the mere man whom they see, nay perhaps 
painfully feel, toiling at their side through the poor 
jostlings of existence, can be made of finer clay than 
themselves. Suppose that some dining acquaintance 
of Sir Thomas Lucy’s, and neighbour of John a 
Combe’s, 1 had snatched an hour or two from the pres¬ 
ervation of his game, and written us a Life of Shakes¬ 
peare! What dissertations should we not have had, 
—not on Hamlet and The Tempest , but on the wool- 
trade, and deer-stealing, and the libel and vagrant 
laws; and how the Poacher became a Player; and how 


^ir Thomas Lucy owned the estate of Charlecote Hall, 
near -Stratford, in the time of Shakespeare, who is said to 
have got into trouble with Sir Thomas for killing deer in 
his park. The “vagrant law,” or, more properly, the 
“vagrancy law,” would apply to Shakespeare as an idle 
youth trespassing on another man’s land; the “libel law,” 
because he is reported to have written a ballad ridiculing 
Lucy and to have used him as the original for Justice Shal¬ 
low, a comic figure in The Merry Wives of Windsor. John 
a Combe was a citizen of Stratford, from whom Shakes¬ 
peare purchased land; he .is said to have been a usurer. 
Tradition ascribes to Shakespeare a satirical epitaph on 
him. He was apparently in the wool business. 



Carlyle's Essay on Burns 


3 


Sir Thomas and Mr. John had Christian bowels, 1 and 
did not push him to extremities! In like manner, we 
believe, with respect to Burns, that till the compan¬ 
ions of his pilgrimage, the Honourable Excise Com¬ 
missioners, and the Gentlemen of the Caledonian 
Hunt, and the Dumfries Aristocracy, and all the 
Squires and Earls, equally with the Ayr Writers, and 
the New and Old Light Clergy, 2 whom he had to do 
with, shall have become invisible in the darkness of 
the Past, or visible only by light borrowed from his 
juxtaposition, it will be difficult to measure him by 
any true standard, or to estimate what he really was 
and did, in the eighteenth century, for his country and 
the world. It will be difficult, we say; but still a fair 
problem for literary historians; and repeated attempts 
will give us repeated approximations. 

3. His former Biographers have done something, 
no doubt, but by no means a great deal, to assist us. 
Dr. Currie and Mr. Walker, 3 the principal of these 
writers, have both, we think, mistaken one essentially 
important thing: Their own and the world’s true re¬ 
lation to their author, and the style in which it be- 


X A curious phrase, based on various passages in the Bible 
and derived from the ancient Hebrew notion that the 
bowels were the seat of pity and tenderness. 

-The Excise Commissioners were those to whom Burns 
was responsible in his office of Exciseman; the Gentlemen 
of the Caledonian Hunt were an aristocratic club of Edin¬ 
burgh to whom he dedicated the* Edinburgh edition of his 
poems; “Writers” is a Scotch term for lawyers. The Old 
Light Clergy represented the rigid, orthodox wing of the 
Scottish church or kirk; the New Lights were the liberal 
theologians. Burns identified himself with the latter and 
opposed the former. 

3 Currie’s biography of Burns was prefixed to an edition 

of his works published in 1800; Walker’s appeared in 1811. 





4 


Carlyle's Essay on Burns 


came such men to think and to speak of such a man. 
Dr. Currie loved the poet truly; more perhaps than he 
avowed to his readers, or even to himself; yet he 
everywhere introduces him with a certain patronizing, 
apologetic air; as if the polite public might- think it 
strange and half unwarrantable that he, a man of 
science, a scholar, and gentleman, should do such hon¬ 
our to a rustic. In all this, however, we readily ad¬ 
mit that his fault was not want of love, but weakness 
of faith; and regret that the first and kindest of all 
our poet’s biographers should not have seen farther, 
or believed more boldly what he saw. Mr. Walker of¬ 
fends more deeply in the same kind: and both err 
alike in presenting us with a detached catalogue of 
his several supposed attributes, virtues, and vices, in¬ 
stead of a delineation of the resulting character as a 
living unity. This, however, is not painting a por¬ 
trait; but gauging the length and breadth of the sev¬ 
eral features, and jotting down their dimensions in 
arithmetical ciphers. Nay, it is not so much as this: 
for we are yet to learn by what arts or instruments 
the mind could be so measured and gauged. 

4. Mr., Lockhart, we 1 are happy to say, has avoided 
both these errors. He uniformly treats Burns as the 
high and remarkable man the public voice has now pro¬ 
nounced him to be: and in delineating him, he has 
avoided the method of separate generalities, and rather 
sought for characteristic incidents, habits, actions, 
sayings; in a word, fot aspects which exhibit the whole 
man, as he looked and lived among his fellows. The 
book accordingly, with all its deficiencies, gives more 
insight, we think, into the true character of Burns, 
than any prior biography: though, being written on 


a The “editorial we”: used throughout to mean Carlyle 
himself. 



Carlyle's Essay on Burns 


5 


the very popular and condensed scheme of an article 
for Constable's Miscellany, it has less depth than we 
could have wished and expected from a writer of such 
power; and contains rather more, and more multifar¬ 
ious, quotations, than belong of right to an original 
production. Indeed, Mr. Lockhart’s own writing is 
generally so good, so clear, direct and nervous, that we 
seldom wish to see it making place for another man’s. 
However, the spirit of the work is throughout candid, 
tolerant, and anxiously conciliating; compliments and 
praises are liberally distributed, on all hands, to great 
and small; and, as Mr. Morris Birkbeck observes of the 
society in the backwoods of America, ‘the courtesies 
of polite life are never lost sight of for a moment.’ 
But there are better things than these in the volume; 
and we can safely testify, not only that it is easily and 
pleasantly read a first time, but may even be without 
difficulty read again. 

5. Nevertheless, we are far from thinking that the 
problem of Burns’s Biography has yet been adequately 
solved. We do not allude so much to deficiency of 
facts or documents,—though of these we are still every 
day receiving some fresh accession,—as to the limited 
and imperfect application of them to the great end of 
Biography. Our notions upon this subject may per¬ 
haps appear extravagant; but if an individual is 
really of consequence enough to have his life and 
character recorded for public remembrance, we have 
always been of opinion, that the public ought to be 
made acquainted with all the inward springs and re¬ 
lations of his character. How did the world and man’s 
life, from his particular position, represent them¬ 
selves to his mind ? How did coexisting circum¬ 
stances modify him from without; how did he modify 
these from within? With what endeavours and what 
efficacy rule over them; with what resistance and 


6 


Carlyle's Essay on Burns 


what suffering sink under them? In one word, what and 
how produced was the effect of society on him; what 
and how produced was his effect on society? He who 
should answer these questions, in regard to any in¬ 
dividual, would, as we believe, furnish a model of per¬ 
fection in Biography. Few individuals, indeed, can 
deserve such a study; and many lives will be written, 
and, for the gratification of innocent curiosity, ought 
to be written,__and read, and forgotten, which are not 
in this sense oiographies. But Burns, if we mistake 
not, is one of these few individuals; and such a study, 
at least with such a result, he has not yet obtained. 
Our own contributions to it, we are aware, can be but 
scanty and feeble; but we offer them with good-will, 
and trust they may meet with acceptance from those 
they are intended for. 

6. Burns first came upon the world as a prodigy; 
and was, in that character, entertained by it, in the 
usual fashion, with loud, vague, tumultuous wonder, 
speedily subsiding into censure and neglect; till his 
early and most mournful death again awakened an 
enthusiasm for him, which, especially as there was 
now nothing to be done, and much to be spoken, has 
prolonged itself even to our own time. It is true, the 
‘nine days’" have long since elapsed; and the very con¬ 
tinuance of this clamour proves that Burns was no 
vulgar wonder. Accordingly, even in sober judg¬ 
ments, where, _as years passed by, he has come to rest 
more and more exclusively on his own intrinsic merits, 
and may now be well-nigh shorn of that casual 2 radi¬ 
ance, he appears not only as a true British poet, but 


deferring to the proverbial expression that an extra¬ 
ordinary thing is a “nine days’ wonder.” 

“Accidental; due to chance. The idea is that Burns’s en¬ 
during fame does not owe much to the facts that he was a 



Carlyle's Essay on Burns 


7 


as one of the most considerable British men of the 
eighteenth century. Let it not be objected that he 
did little. He did much, if we consider where and 
how. If the work performed was small, we must re¬ 
member that he had his very materials to discover; 
for the metal he worked in lay hid under the desert 
moor, where no eye but his had guessed its existence; 
and we may almost say, that with his own hand he had 
to construct the tools for fashioning it. For he found 
himself in deepest obscurity, without help, without 
instruction, without model; or with models only of the 
meanest sort. An educated man stands, as it were, in 
the midst of a boundless arsenal and magazine, filled 
with all the weapons and engines which man’s skill 
has been able to devise from the earliest time; and he 
works, accordingly, with a strength borrowed from all 
past ages. How different is his state who stands on 
the outside of that storehouse, and feels that its gates 
must be stormed, or remain for ever shut against him! 
His means are the commonest and rudest; the mere 
work done is no measure of his strength. A dwarf 
behind his steam-engine may remove mountains; but 
no dwarf will hew them down with a pickaxe; and he 
must be a Titan that hurls them abroad with his 
arms. 

7. It is in this last shape that Burns presents him¬ 
self. Born in an age the most prosaic Britain had 
yet seen, 1 and in a condition the most disadvantageous, 
where his mind, if it accomplished aught, must ac¬ 
complish it under the pressure of continual bodily toil, 

peasant with few opportunities and that he led an unfor¬ 
tunate life—both facts more or less accidental, that is, not 
essential to his true value. 

^Carlyle, like many nineteenth-century writers, can see 
little good in the eighteenth century and is habitually un¬ 
fair to it. 



8 


Carlyle's Essay on Burns 


nay of penury and desponding apprehension of the 
worst evils, and with no furtherance but such knowl¬ 
edge as dwells in a_ poor man’s hut, and the rhymes 
of a Ferguson or Ramsay 1 for his standard of beauty, 
he sinks not under all these impediments: through the 
fogs and darkness of that obscure region, his lynx eye 
discerns the true relations of the world and human 
life; he grows into intellectual strength, and trains 
himself into intellectual expertness. Impelled by the 
expansive movement of his own irrepressible soul, he 
struggles forward into the general view; and with 
haughty modesty lays down before us, as the fruit 
of his labour, a gift which Time has now pronounced 
imperishable. Add to all this, that his darksome, 
drudging childhood and youth was by far the kindliest 
era of his whole life; and that he died in his thirty- 
seventh year; and then ask, If it be strange that his 
poems are imperfect, and of small extent, or that his 
genius attained no mastery in its art? Alas, his Sun 
shone as through a tropical tornado; and the pale 
Shadow of Death eclipsed it at noon! Shrouded in 
such baleful vapours, the genius of Burns was never 
seen in clear azure splendour, enlightening the world: 


1 Allen Ramsay (1686-1758) was of great service to litera¬ 
ture in collecting many old Scottish songs and ballads; he 
also wrote himself in the Scottish dialect. Robert Ferguson 
—the more usual spelling—was an Edinburgh poet, 1750- 
1774, to whom Burns was greatly indebted. These two 
men were the most important before Burns in the so-called 
“Scottish vernacular revival,” that is, the movement to 
write poetry to be read as well as songs to be sung in the 
spoken dialect of Scotland. Burns, like Shakespeare, was 
not a solitary figure, but the greatest poet in a group num¬ 
bering several writers of beautiful lyrics. Carlyle under¬ 
estimates the worth of Burns’s forerunners and the extent 
of his debt to them. Burns himself acknowledged the debt 
handsomely. 



Carlyle's Essay on Burns 


but some beams from it did, by fits, pierce through; 
and it tinted those clouds with rainbow and orient 
colors, into a glory and stern grandeur, which men 
silently gazed on with wonder and tears! 

8. We are anxious not to exaggerate; for it is ex¬ 
position rather than admiration that our readers re¬ 
quire of us here; and yet to avoid some tendency to 
that side is no easy matter. We love Burns, and we 
pity him; and love and pity are prone to magnify. 
Criticism, it is sometimes thought, should be a cold 
business; we are not so sure of this; but, at all events, 
our concern with Burns is not exclusively that of 
critics. True and genial as his poetry must appear, it 
is not chiefly as a poet, but as a man, that he interests 
and affects us. He was often advised to write a 
tragedy: time and means were not lent him for this; 
but through life he enacted a tragedy, and one of the 
deepest. We question whether the world has since 
witnessed so utterly sad a scene; whether Napoleon 
himself, left to brawl with Sir Hudson Lowe, and per¬ 
ish on his rock, ‘amid the melancholy main,” pre¬ 
sented to the reflecting mind such a ‘spectacle of pity 
i and fear’ * 2 as did this intrinsically nobler, gentler, and 
| perhaps greater soul, wasting itself away in a hope¬ 
less struggle with base entanglements, which coiled 
closer and closer round him, till only death opened 
him an outlet. Conquerors are a class of men with 
whom, for most part, the world could well dispense; 
nor can the hard intellect, the unsympathising lofti¬ 
ness, and high but selfish enthusiasm of such persons, 
inspire us in general with any affection; at best it 
may excite amazement; and their fall, like that of a 
pyramid, will be beheld with a certain sadness and 


TTrom James Thomson’s Castle of Indolence, I, 30. 

2 Aristotle’s phrase to express the emotions aroused by a 
true tragic drama. , 




10 


Carlyle's Essay on Burns 


awe. But a true Poet, a man in whose heart resides 
some effluence of Wisdom, some tone of the ‘Eternal 
Melodies,’ is the most precious gift that can be be¬ 
stowed on a generation: we see in him a freer, purer 
development of whatever is noblest in ourselves; his 
life is a rich lesson to us, and we mourn his death, as 
that of a benefactor who loved and taught us. 

9. Such a gift had Nature in her bounty bestowed 
on us in Robert Burns; but with queenlike indifference 
she cast it from her hand, like a thing of no moment; 
and it was defaced and torn asunder, as an idle bauble, 
before we recognised it. To the ill-starred Burns was 
given the power of making man’s life more venerable, 
but that of wisely guiding his own life was not given. 
Destiny,—for so in our ignorance we must speak,— 
his faults, the faults of others, proved too hard for 
him; and that spirit which might have soared, could 
it but have walked, soon sank to the dust, its glorious 
faculties trodden under foot in the blossom; and 
died, we may almost say, without ever having lived. 
And so kind and warm a soul; so full of inborn riches, 
of love to all living and lifeless things! How his 
heart flows out in sympathy over universal Nature; 
and in her bleakest provinces discerns a beauty and a 
meaning! The ‘Daisy’ falls not unheeded under his 
plowshare; nor the ruined nest of that ‘wee, cower¬ 
ing, timorous beastie,’ cast forth, after all its provi¬ 
dent pains, to ‘thole the sleety dribble, and cranreuch 
cauld.’ 1 The ‘hoar visage’ of Winter delights him: 
he dwells with a sad and oft-returning fondness in 
these scenes of solemn desolation; but the voice of the 
tempest becomes an anthem to his ears; he loves to 
walk in the sounding woods, for ‘it raises his thoughts 

a See Burns’s poems, “To a Mountain Daisy” and “To a 
Mouse.” 





Carlyle's Essay on Burns 


11 


to Him that walketh on the wings of the wind.’ 1 A 
true Poet-soul, for it needs but to be struck, and the 
sound it yields will be music! But observe him chiefly 
as he mingles with his brother men. What warm, 
all-comprehending fellow-feeling; what trustful, 
boundless love; what generous exaggeration of the ob¬ 
ject loved! His rustic friend, his nut-brown maiden, 
are no longer mean and homely, but a hero and a 
queen, whom he prizes as the paragons of Earth. The 
rough scenes of Scottish life, not seen by him in any 
Arcadian illusion, 2 but in the rude contradiction, in 
the smoke and soil of a too harsh reality, are still 
lovely to hinj: Poverty is indeed his companion, but 
Love also, and Courage; the simple feelings, the worth, 
the nobleness, that dwell under the straw roof, are 
dear and venerable to his heart: and thus over the 
lowest provinces of man’s existence he pours the 
glory of his own soul; and they rise, in shadow and 
sunshine, softened and brightened into a beauty which 
other eyes discern not in the highest. He has a just 
self-consciousness, which too often degenerates into 


Lockhart (p. 269) quotes from a letter of Burns: “There 
is scarcely any earthly object gives me more—I do not know 
if I should call it pleasure—but something which exalts me, 
something which enraptures me—than to walk in the shel¬ 
tered side of a wood in a cloudy winter day, and hear the 
stormy wind, howling among the trees, and raving over the 
plain. It is my best season for devotion: My mind is 
wrapt up in a kind of enthusiasm to Him, who, in the lang¬ 
uage of the Hebrew Bard, ‘walks on the wings of the 
wind’.” 

2 Arcadia was a district in southern Greece, idealized as 
the home of happy, innocent shepherds and the imagined 
scene of many pastoral poems. It is a symbol of romance; 
“Arcadian illusion” is equivalent to a romantic and unreal 
view of country life. 



12 


Carlyle’s Essay on Burns 


pride; yet it is a noble pride, for defence, 1 not for of¬ 
fence; no cold, suspicious feeling, but a frank and so¬ 
cial one. The Peasant Poet bears himself, we might 
say, like a King in exile: he is cast among the low, and 
feels himself equal to the highest; yet he claims no 
rank, that none may be disputed to him. The forward 
he can repel, the supercilious he can subdue; preten¬ 
sions of wealth or ancestry are of no avail with him; 
there is a fire in that dark eye, under which the ‘in¬ 
solence of condescension’ cannot thrive. In his abase¬ 
ment, in his extreme need, he forgets not for a mo¬ 
ment the majesty of Poetry and Manhood. And yet, 
far as he feels himself above common men, he wanders 
not apart from them, but mixes warmly in their in¬ 
terests; nay, throws himself into their arms; and, as 
it were, entreats them to love him. It is moving to see 
jw, in his darkest despondency, this proud being still 
seeks relief from friendship; unbosoms himself, often 
to the unworthy: and, amid tears, strains to his glow¬ 
ing heart a heart that knows only the name of friend¬ 
ship. And yet he was ‘quick to learn;’ 2 a man of keen 
vision, before whom common disguises afforded no 
concealment. His understanding saw through the hol¬ 
lowness even of accomplished deceivers; but there was 
a generous credulity in his heart. And so did our 
Peasant show himself among us; ‘a soul like an iEolian 
harp, in whose strings the vulgar wind, as it passed 


3 Carlyle probably has in mind Dr. Johnson’s famous 
words quoted by Boswell in his Life of Johnson , under the 
date 1754: “ ‘Sir (said Johnson) that is not Lord Chester¬ 

field; he is the proudest man this day existing.’ ‘No (said 
Dr. Adams) there is one person, at least, as proud; I think, 
by your own account, you are the prouder man of the two.’ 
‘But mine (replied Johnson instantly) was defensive 
pride’.” Carlyle, like Burns, had a good deal of this pride. 

*See Burns’s poem, “A Bard’s Epitaph.” 



Carlyle's Essay on Burns 


18 


through them, changed itself into articulate melody.’ 1 
And this was he for whom the world found no fitter 
business than quarreling with smugglers and vintners, 
computing excise-dues upon tallow, and gauging ale- 
barrels! In such toils was that mightly Spirit sor¬ 
rowfully wasted: and a hundred years may pass on, 
before another such is given us to waste. 

10. All that remains of Burns, the Writings he has 
left, seem to us, as we hinted above, no more than a 
poor mutilated fraction of what was in him; brief, 
broken glimpses of a genius that could never show 
itself complete; that wanted all things for complete¬ 
ness: culture, leisure, true effort, nay even length of 
life. His poems are, with scarcely any exception, mere 
occasional effusions; poured forth with little premedi¬ 
tation ; expressing, by such means as offered, the pas¬ 
sion, opinion, or humour of the hour. Never in one 
instance was it permitted him to grapple with any 
subject with the full collection of his strength, to fuse 
and mould it in the concentrated fire of his genius. 
To try by the strict rules of Art such imperfect frag¬ 
ments, would be at once unprofitable and unfair. Nev¬ 
ertheless, there is something in these poems, marred 
and defective as they are, which forbids the most 
fastidious student of poetry to pass them by. Some 
sort of enduring quality they must have: for, after 
fifty years of the wildest vicissitudes in poetic taste, 3 
they still continue to be read; nay, are read more and 


"An Aeolian harp is played on by the wind. Possibly 
this comparison was suggested to Carlyle by Burns’s words 
in the letter to Mrs. Dunlop quoted by Lockhart (p. 197) 
and requoted by Carlyle in paragraph 22. 

Wicissitudes are changes, especially complete changes, of 
condition or circumstances. During the fifty years before 
1S28, the great change took place from classicism to ro¬ 
manticism in English poetry. 



14 


Carlyle’s Essay on Burns 


more eagerly, more and more extensively; and this 
not only by literary virtuosos, 1 and that class upon 
whom transitory causes operate most strongly, but 
by all classes, down to the most hard, unlettered, and 
truly natural class, who read little, and especially no 
poetry, except because they find pleasure in it. The 
grounds of so singular and wide a popularity, which 
extends, in a literal sense, from the palace to the 
hut, and over all regions where the English tongue is 
spoken, are well worth inquiring into. After every 
just deduction, it seems to imply some rare excellence 
in these works. What is that excellence? 

11. To answer this question will not lead us far. 
The excellence of Burns is, indeed, among the rarest, 
whether in poetry or prose; but, at the same time, it 
is plain and easily recognised: his Sincerity, 2 his in¬ 
disputable air of Truth. Here are no fabulous woes 
or joys; no hollow fantastic sentimentalities; no wire¬ 
drawn refinings, either in thought or feeling: the pas¬ 
sion that is traced before us has glowed in a living 
heart; the opinion he utters has risen in his own un¬ 
derstanding, and been a light to his own steps. He 


Virtuosos are persons possessed of a critical knowledge 
of the fine arts, here of poetry; Carlyle thinks of them as 
setting the fashion in literary taste. 

2 Carlyle constantly hammered on this idea. Compare 
what he says in Heroes and Hero Worship, “The Hero as 
Prophet”: “But of a Great Man especially, of him I will 
venture to assert that it is incredible he should have been 
other than true. It seems to me the primary foundation 
of him, and of all that can lie in him, this. No Mirabeau, 
Napoleon, Burns, Cromwell, no man adequate to do any¬ 
thing, but is first of all in right earnest about it; what I 
call a sincere man. I should say sincerity, a deep, great, 
genuine sincerity, is the first characteristic of all men in 
any way heroic.” 



Carlyle's Essay on Burns 


15 


does not write from hearsay, but from sight and ex¬ 
perience ; it is the scenes that he has lived and laboured 
amidst, that he describes: those scenes, rude and 
humble as they are, have kindled beautiful emotions in 
his soul, noble thoughts, and definite resolves; and he 
speaks forth what is in him, not from any outward call 
of vanity or interest, but because his heart is too full 
to be silent. He speaks it with such melody and modu¬ 
lation as he can; ‘in homely rustic jingle;’ but it is 
his own, and genuine. This is the grand secret for 
finding readers and retaining them: let him who 
would move and convince others, be first moved and 
convinced himself. Horace’s rule, Si vis me flere, L is 
applicable in a wider sense than the literal one. To 
every poet, to every writer, we might say: Be true, if 
you would be believed. Let a man speak forth with 
genuine earnestness the thought, the emotion, the ac¬ 
tual condition of his own heart; and other men, so 
strangely are we all knit together by the tie of sym¬ 
pathy, must and will give heed to him. In culture, in 
extent of view, we may stand above the speaker, or 
below him; but in either case, his words, if they are 
earnest and sincere, will find some response within us; 
for in spite of all casual varieties in outward rank 
or inward, as face answers to face, so does the heart of 
man to man. 

12. This may appear a very simple principle, and 
one which Burns had little merit in discovering. True, 
the discovery is easy enough: but the practical ap- 


1 Horace’s full rule is, (( Si vis me flere, dolendum est 
primum ipsi tibi” (De Arte Poetica, Book II, 102, 103) : 
“If you wish me to weep, you must first be grieved your¬ 
self.” This Horace lays down as one of the chief requi¬ 
sites of a good poet. 



16 


Carlyle’s Essay on Burns 


pliance 1 is not easy; is indeed the fundamental diffi¬ 
culty which all poets have to strive with, and which 
scarcely one in the hundred ever fairly surmounts. A 
nead too dull to discriminate the true from the false; 
a heart too aun to love me one at all risks, and to 
hate the other in spite of all temptations, are alike 
mtal to a writer. With either, or, as more commonly 
happens, with both, of these deficiencies, combine a 
love of distinction, a wish to be original, which is 
seldom wanting, and we have Anectation, the bane of 
literature, as Cant’" its elder brother, is of morals. 
How often does the one and the other front us, in 
poetry, as in life! Great poets themselves are not al¬ 
ways free of this vice; nay, it is precisely on a certain 
sort and degree of greatness that it is most commonly 
ingrafted. A strong effort after excellence will some¬ 
times solace itself with a mere shadow of success; he 
who has much to unfold, will sometimes unfold it im¬ 
perfectly. Byron, for instance, was no common man: 
yet if we examine his poetry with this view, we shall 
find it "far enough from faultless. Generally speak¬ 
ing, we should say that it is not true. He refreshes 
us, not with the divine fountain, but too often with 
vulgar strong waters, stimulating indeed to the taste, 
but soon ending in dislike, or even nausea. Are his 

"Modern usage would require application here, appliance 
being used to-day of a thing applied to effect a result rather 
than of the act of applying. 

2 “Cant: the hypocritical or perfunctory use of speech in 
order to obtain credit for piety or goodness.” Carlyle, ex¬ 
alting as he did the virtue of sincerity, was very scornful 
of its opposite, and has much to say against Cant. The 
Standard Dictionary, to illustrate the definition just given, 
quotes from Carlyle (French Revolution, Yol. I, book II) : 
“Con# is itself properly a double-distilled Lie; the second 
power of a Lie.” 



Carlyle's Essay on Burns 


17 


Harolds and Giaours, 1 we would ask, real men; we 
mean, poetically consistent and conceivable men? Do 
not these characters, does not the character of their 
author, which more or less shines through them all, 
rather appear a thing put on for the occasion; no 
natural or possible mode of being, but something in¬ 
tended to look much grander than nature? Surely, all 
these stormful agonies, this volcanic heroism, super¬ 
human contempt, and moody desperation, with so much 
scowling, and teeth-gr\ashing, and other sulphurous 
humour, 2 is more like the brawling of a player in some 
paltry tragedy, which is to last three hours, than the 
bearing of a man in the business of life, which is to 
last three score and ten years. To our minds, there is 
a taint of this sort, something which we should call 
theatrical, false, affected, in every one of these other¬ 
wise so powerful pieces. Perhaps Don Juan, 3 espec¬ 
ially the latter parts of it, is the only thing approach¬ 
ing to a sincere work, he ever wrote; the only work 
where he showed himself, in any measure, as he was; 
and seemed so intent on his subject as, for moments, 
to forget himself. Yet Byron hated this vice; we 
believe, heartily detested it: nay, he had declared for¬ 
mal war against it in words. So difficult is it even 
for the strongest to make this primary attainment, 


Reference is to Byron’s Childe Harold (1812-18) and his 
Chiaour (1813). The former is an account of a journey 
through Europe, made by Byron himself, though he as¬ 
sumes the name of Harold for his pilgrim; the second is an 
oriental tale, Giaour being a term used by Mohammedans 
of a Christian. 

2 Probably as suggesting Hell, with which the smell of 
burning brimstone or sulphur is traditionally associated. 

3 Byron’s last great work, left unfinished. Critics in gen¬ 
eral have agreed with Carlyle as to the excellence of this 
poem. 



Carlyle's Essay on Burns 


which might seem the simplest of all: to read its own 
consciousness without mistakes, without errors invol¬ 
untary or wilful! We recollect no poet of Burns’s sus¬ 
ceptibility 1 who comes before us from the first, and 
abides with us to the last, with such a total want of 
affectation. He is an honest man, and an honest writer. 
In his success and his failures, in his greatness and 
his littleness, he is ever clear, simple, true, and glitters 
with no lustre but his own. We reckon this to be a 
great virtue; to be, in fact, the root of most other vir¬ 
tues, literary as Well as moral. 

13. Here, however, let us say, it is to the Poetry 
of Burns that we now allude; to those writings which 
he had time to meditate, and where no special reason 
existed to warp his critical feeling, or obstruct his en¬ 
deavour to fulfil it. Certain of his Letters, and other 
fractions of prose composition, by no means deserve 
this, praise. Here, doubtless, there is not the same 
natural truth of style; but on^the contrary, something 
not only stiff, but strained and twisted; a certain, 
high-flown inflated tone; the stilting emphasis of 
which contrasts ill with the firmness and rugged sim¬ 
plicity of even his poorest verses. 2 Thus no man, it 

There is an interesting bit of insight here into human 
nature. A person who is susceptible to all sorts of in¬ 
fluences and responsive to every idea or experience’is prone 
at times to cultivate emotions or opinions that are sug¬ 
gested to him and to pretend even to himself that they are 
more real than they are. His insincerity in this is largely 
“involuntary” or, at least, unconscious. 

2 To some extent Carlyle exaggerates the defects of 
Burns's prose style. The criticism applies, however, to all 
Burns’s writings in standard English. His native tongue 
was the Scottish dialect, and his attempts to use purely 
literary English often have “a certain high-flown inflated 
tone.” This is perhaps more noticeable In his poetry than 
in his prose. His best poems are all in dialect. 



Carlyle's Essay on Burns 


19 


♦vould appear, is altogether unaffected. Does not 
Shakespeare himself sometimes premeditate the sheer¬ 
est bombast! But even with regard to these Letters 
of Burns, it is but fair to state that he had two ex¬ 
cuses. The first was his comparative deficiency in 
language. Burns, though for most part he writes 
with singular force, and even gracefulness, is not 
master of English prose, as he is of Scottish verse; 
not master of it, we mean, in proportion to the depth 
and vehemence of his matter. These Letters strike 
us as the effort of a man to express something which 
he has no organ fit for expressing. But a second and 
weightier excuse is to be found in the peculiarity of 
Burns’s social rank. His correspondents are often men 
whose relation to him he has never accurately ascer¬ 
tained; whom therefore he is either forearming him¬ 
self against, or else unconsciously flattering, by adopt¬ 
ing the style he thinks will please them. At all events, 
we should remember that these faults, even in his Let¬ 
ters, are not the rule, but the exception. Whenever he 
writes, as one would ever wish to do, to trusted friends 
and on real interests, his style becomes simple, vigor¬ 
ous, expressive, sometimes even beautiful. His letters 
to Mrs. Dunlop are uniformly excellent. 

14. But we return to his Poetry. In addition to 
its ^Sinceri ty, it has another peculiar merit, which in¬ 
deed is but a mode, or perhaps a means, of the fore¬ 
going: this displays itself in his choice of subjects ; or 
rather in his indifference as to subjects, and the power 
he has of making all subjects interesting. The or¬ 
dinary poet, like the ordinary ’ manTisforever seek¬ 
ing in external circumstances the help which can-be 
found only in himself. In what is familiar and near 
at hand, he discerns no form or comeliness: 1 home is 


Tsaiah LIII, 2. 




20 


Carlyle's Essay on Burns 


not poetical but prosaic; it is in some past, distant, 
conventional heroic world, that poetry resides for him; 
were he there and not here, were he thus and not so, it 
would be well with him. Hence our innumerable host 
of rose-coloured Novels and iron-mailed Epics, with 
their locality not on the Earth, but somewhere nearer 
to the Moon. Hence our Virgins of the Sun, and our 
Knights of the Cross, malicious Saracens in turbans, 
and copper-coloured Chiefs in wampum, 1 and so many 
other truculent figures from the heroic times or the 
heroic climates, who on all hands swarm in our poetry. 
Peace be with them! But yet, as a great moralist pro¬ 
posed preaching to the men of this century, so would 
we fain preach to the poets, ‘a sermon on the duty of 
staying at home/ Let them be sure that heroic ages 
and heroic climates can do little for them. That form 
of life has attraction for us, less because it is better 
or nobler than our own, than simply because it is dif¬ 
ferent; and even this attraction must be of the most 
transient sort. For will not our own age, one day, be 
an ancient one; and have as quaint a costume as the 
rest; not contrasted with the rest, therefore, but 
ranked along with them, jn respect of quaintness? 
Does Homer interest us now, because he wrote of what 
passed beyond his native Greece, and two centuries be¬ 
fore he was born; or because he wrote what passed in 
God’s world, and in the heart of man, which is the 
same after thirty centuries? Let our poets look to 
this: is their feeling really finer, truer, and their vis¬ 
ion deeper than that of other men, they have nothing 
to fear, even from the humblest subject; is it not so, 

^‘Virgins of the Sun” are probably suggested by Thomas 
Moore’s Lalla RooJch; “Knights of the Cross, malicious 
Saracens in turbans,” by Scott’s Talisman; “copper-coloured 

Chiefs in wampum,” by the novels of James Fenimore 

Cooper. 



Carlyle’s Essay on Burns 


21 


—they have nothing to hope, but an ephemeral favour, 
even from the highest. 

15. The poet, we imagine, can never have far to 
seek for a subject: the elements of his art are in him, 
and around him on every hand; for him the Ideal 
world is not remote from the Actual, but under it and 
within it: nay, he is a poet, precisely because he can 
discern it there. Wherever there is a sky above him, 
and a world around him, the poet is in his place; for 
here too is man’s existence, with its infinite longings 
and small acquirings; its ever-thwarted, ever-renewed 
endeavours; its unspeakable aspirations, its tears and 
hopes that wander through Eternity; and all the mys¬ 
tery of brightness and of gloom that it was ever made 
of, in any age or climate, since man first began to live. 
Is there not the fifth act of a Tragedy 1 in every death¬ 
bed, though it were a peasant’s, and a bed of heath? 
And are wooings and weddings obsolete, that there can 
be Comedy no longer? Or are men suddenly grown 
wise, that Laughter must no longer shake his sides, 
but be cheated of his Farce? Man’s life and nature is, 
as it was, and as fjt will ever be. But the poet must 
have an eye to read these things, and a heart to un¬ 
derstand them; or they come and pass away before 
him in vain. He is a vates , 2 a seer; a gift of vision 

x The Elizabethan drama always has five acts; hence the 
fifth act of a tragedy contains the tragic conclusion. 

2 In Heroes and Hero Worship, “The Hero as Poet,” Car¬ 
lyle expands this idea: “Poet and Prophet differ greatly 
in our loose modern notions of them. In some old lan¬ 
guages, again, the titles are synonymous; Vates [in Latin] 
means both Prophet and Poet: and indeed at all times, 
Prophet and Poet, well understood, have much kindred 
meaning. Fundamentally indeed they are still the same; 
in this most important respect especially, that they have 
penetrated both of them into the sacred mystery of the 
Universe.” 



22 


Carlyle's Essay on Burns 


has been given him. Has life no meanings for him, 
which another cannot equally decipher; then he is no 
poet, and Delphi itself will not make him one. 

16. In this respect, Burns, though not perhaps ab¬ 
solutely a great poet, better manifests his capability, 
better proves the truth of his genius, than if he had, 
by his own strength, kept the whole Minerva Press go¬ 
ing, to the end of his literary course. He shows him¬ 
self at least a poet, of Nature’s own making; and 
Nature, after all, is still the grand agent in making 
poets. We often hear of this and the other external 
condition being requisite for the existence of a poet. 
Sometimes it is a certain sort of training; he must 
have studied certain things, studied for instance ‘the 
elder dramatists.’ 1 and so learned a poetic language; 
as if poetry lay in the tongue, not in the heart. At 
other times we are told he must be bred in a certain 
rank, and must be on confidential footing with the 
higher classes; because, above all things, he must see 
the world. As tc seeing the world, we apprehend this 
will cause him little difficulty, if he have but eyesight 
to see it with. Without eyesight, indeed, the task 
might be hard. The blind or the purblind man ‘travels 
from Dan to Beersheba, and finds it all barren.’ 2 But 
happily every poet is born in the world; and sees it, 
with or against his will, every day and every hour 

^The dramatists contemporary in a large sense with 
Shakespeare. 

2 Quoted from Laurence Sterne’s Sentimental Journey 
(1768): “I pity the man who can travel from Dan to 
Beersheba and cry, ‘Tis all barren’.” The phrase “from 
Pan to Beersheba” is found in the Bible. The two places 
marked the northern and the souther extremities of Pal¬ 
estine, and are used to jiean from one end of the country 
—or the world—to the other.” 



Carlyle's Essay on Burns 


23 


he lives. The mysterious workmanship of man’s heart, 
the true light and the inscrutable darkness of man’s 
destiny, reveal themselves not only in capital cities, 
and crowded saloons, but in every hut and hamlet 
j where men have their abode. Nay, do not the ele- 
\ ments of all human virtues and all human vices; the 
: passions at once of a Borgia and of a Luther, * 1 lie 
written, in stronger or fainter lines, in the conscious¬ 
ness of every individual bosom, that has practised 
honest self-examination? Truly, this same world 
! may be seen in Mossgiel and Tarbolton, if we look 
| well, as clearly as it ever came to light in Crockford’s, 
| or the Tuileries itself. 

17. But sometimes still harder requisitions are laid 
! on the poor aspirant to poetry; for it is hinted that 
he should have been born two centuries ago; inasmuch 
I as poetry, about that date, vanished from the earth, 
and became no longer attainable by men! 2 Such cobweb 
speculations have, now and then, overhung the field 
of literature; but they obstruct not the growth of any 
j plant there: the Shakspeare or the Burns, uncon¬ 
sciously, and merely as he walks onward, silently 


3 Caesar Borgia (1476-1507), an Italian prince of extra¬ 
ordinary wickedness; Martin Luther (1483-1546), the 
! founder of Protestantism. Carlyle uses the two names to 
j represent the worst and the best of human nature, 
i 2 The reference is to the theory laid down in Macaulay’s 
Essay on Milton , published in the E(Vrilmrgh Review in 
! 1825. In this essay Macaulay says, “We think that ,as civ¬ 
ilization advances, poetry almost necessarily declines. . . . 
In proportion as men know more and think more, they look 
less at individuals and more at classes. They therefore 

I make better theories and worse poems. .... In a rude 

j state of society, men are children with a greater variety of 
ideas. It is therefore in such a society that we may ex- 
I pect to find the poetical temperament in its highest per- 
j fection.” 






24 


Carlyle's Essay on Burns 


brushes them away. Is not every genius an impossi¬ 
bility till he appear ? Why do we call him new and 
original, if we saw where his marble was lying, and 
what fabric he could rear from it? It is not the ma¬ 
terial, but the workman that is wanting. It is not the 
dark place that hinders, but the dim eye. A Scottish 
peasant’s life was the meanest and rudest of all lives, 
till Burns became a poet in it, and a poet of it; found 
it a man's life, and therefore significant to men. A 
thousand battle-fields remain unsung; but the Woun 
ded Hare 1 has not perished without its memorial; a 
balm of mercy yet breathes on us from its dumb 
agonies, because a poet was there. Our Hallowe'en* * 
had passed and repassed, in rude awe and laughter, 
since the era of the Druids; but no Theocritus, till 
Burns, discerned in it the materials of a Scottish 
Idyl: neither was the Holy Fair any Council of Trent 
or Roman Jubilee; but nevertheless, Superstition and 
Hypocrisy and Fun having been propitious to him, in 
this man’s hand it became a poem, instinct with satire, 
and genuine comic life. 3 Let but the true poet be 

X A. poem by Burns on, seeing a hare wounded and left to 
die by a sportsman. The poem is in literary English and 
not one of Burns’s best, though its indignation and sym¬ 
pathy do credit to his heart. 

2 Burns wrote a poem with this title dealing with the 
superstitions and amusements of the Scotch peasants on 
Hallowe’en; as Carlyle implies, some of these practices go 
back to remote pagan times. 

*The Council of Trent was a famous council of the Roman 
Catholic church, which met in the city of Trent in north¬ 
eastern Italy in 1545-63. Roman Jubilee refers to the great 
concourse of Catholics every twenty-five or fifty years at 
Rome. The “Holy Fair,” which Burns celebrated in a 
poem of that name, was a local religious meeting of very 
small importance in comparison with these gatherings. In 
the poem Superstition, Hypocrisy, and Fun are personi- 



Carlyle’s Essay on Burns 


25 


given us, we repeat it, place him where and how you 
will, and true poetry will not be wanting. 

18. Independently of the essential gift of poetic 
feeling, as we have now attempted to describe it, a 
certain rugged sterling worth pervades whatever 
Burns has written: a virtue, as of green fields and 
mountain breezes, dwells in his poetry; it is redolent 
of natural life, and hardy natural men. There is a 
decisive strength in him, and yet a sweet native grace¬ 
fulness: he is tender, he is vehement, yet without 
constraint or too visible effort; he melts the heart, or 
inflames it, with a power which seems habitual and 
familiar to him. We see that in this man there was 
the gentleness, the trembling pity of a woman, with 
the deep earnestness, the force and passionate ardour 
of a hero. Tears lie in him, and consuming fire; as 
lightning lurks in the drops of the summer cloud. He 
has a resonance in his bosom for every note of human 
feeling; the high and the low, the sad, the ludicrous, 
the joyful, are welcome in their turns to his ‘lightly- 
moved and all-conceiving spirit.’ And observe with 
what a fierce prompt force he grasps his subject, be 
it what it may! How he fixes, as it were, the full 
image of the matter in his eye; full and clear in every 
lineament; and catches the real type and essence of 
it, amid a thousand accidents and superficial circum¬ 
stances, no one of which misleads him! Is it of 
reason; some truth to be discovered? No sophistry, 
no vain surface-logic detains him; quick, resolute, un¬ 
erring, he pierces through into the marrow of the 
question: and sneaks his verdict with an emphasis 
that cannot be forgotten. Is it of description; some 
visual object to be represented? No poet of any age 


fied as three women whom the poet meets on their way to 
the fair. 



26 


Carlyle’s Essay on Burns 


or nation is more graphic than Burns: the character¬ 
istic features disclose themselves to him at a glance; 
three lines from his hand, and we have a likeness. 
And, in that rough dialect, in that rude, often awkward 
metre, 1 so clear and definite a likeness! It seems a 
draughtsman working with a burnt stick; and yet the 
burin of a Retzsch is not more impressive or exact. 

19. 2 Of this last excellence, the plainest and most 
comprehensive of all, being indeed the root and foun¬ 
dation of every sort of talent, poetical or intellectual, 
we could produce innumerable instances from the writ¬ 
ings of Burns. Take these glimpses of a snow-storm 
from his Winter Night (the italics are ours) : 

When biting Boreas, fell and doure, 

Sharp shivers thro’ the leafless bow’r, 

And Phoebus gies a short-liv’d glowr 
Far south the lift , 

Dim-dark’ning thro ’ the flaky show’r 
Or whirling drift : 

’Ae night the storm the steeples rock’d, 

Poor labour sweet in sleep was lock’d, 

While burns wV snawy wreeths upchok’d 
Wild-eddying swirl , 

Or thro’ the mining outlet bock’d 
Down headlong hurl. 

Are there not ‘descriptive touches’ here? The de- 
scriber saw this thing; the essential feature and true 


^his is misleading. Burns’s rhymes are sometimes in¬ 
exact, but his verses are metrically excellent. 

2 This paragraph was not in the original Edinburgh Re¬ 
view edition. 



Carlyle’s Essay on Burns 


27 


likeness of every circumstance in it ; saw, and not with 
the eye only. ‘Poor labour locked in sweet sleep;’ the 
dead stillness of man, unconscious, vanquished, yet not 
unprotected, while such strife of the material elements 
rages, and seems to reign supreme in loneliness: this 
fs of the heart as well as of the eye!—Look also at 
his image of a thaw and prophesied fall of the Auld 
Brig: 1 

When heavy, dark, continued, a’-day rains 
Wi’ deepening deluges o’erflow the plains; 

When from the hills where springs the brawling Coil 
Or stately Lugar’s mossy fountains boil , 

Or where the Greenock winds his moorland course : 

Or haunted Garpal 2 draws his feeble source, 

Arous’d by blust’ring winds and spotting thowes. 

In mony a torrent down his snaw-broo rowes; 

While crashing ice, borne on the roaring speat, 
Sweeps dams and mills and brigs a’ to the gate; 
And from Glenbuck down to the Rottonkey, 

Auld Ayre is just one lengthen’d tumbling s^a; 

Then down ye’ll hurl, Deil nor ye never rise! 

And dash the gumlie jaups up to the pouring skies. 

The last line is in itself a Poussin-picture of that 


J The quotation is taken from Burns’s poem, “The Twa 
Brigs [the two bridges] of Ayr.” The Auld Brig [old 
bridge] of the poem is still standing; the New Brig has 
been destroyed. This latter event is prophesied in the 
passage quoted, which Carlyle applies mistakenly to the 
Auld Brig. . j 

*Carlyle’s note: Falmlosus Hydaspes! (This is quoted 
from Horace, Odes, Book I. xxxii, and means Hydaspes full 
of legends. Carlyle wishes to call attention to the parallel 
thought, which occurred independently to Burns, as he had 
never read Horace.) 



28 


Carlyle's Essay on Burns 


Deluge! The welkin has, as it were, bent down with 
its weight; the ‘gumlie jaups' and the ‘pouring skies’ 
are mingled together; it is a world of rain and ruin. 

In respect of mere clearness and minute fidelity, the 
Farmer’s commendation of his Auld Mare / in plough, 
or in cart, may vie with Homer’s Smithy of the 
Cyclops, or yoking of Priam’s Chariot. l 2 3 Nor have we 
forgotten stout Burnthe-Wind and his brawny cus¬ 
tomers, inspired by Scotch Drink:* but it is needless 
to multiply examples. One other trait of a much finer 
sort we select from mTiltitudes of such among his 
Songs. It gives, in a single line, to the saddest feel¬ 
ing, the saddest environment and local habitation: 

4 The pale Moon is setting beyond the white wave , 
And Time is setting wi ' me, 0; 

Farewell false friends! false lover, farewell! 

I’ll nae mair trouble them nor thee, O. 4 

20. This clearness of sight we have called the 
Foundation of all talent; for in fact, unless we see our 
object, how shall we know how to place or prize it, in 


l See Burns’s poem, “The Auld Fanner’s New-Year- 
Morning Salutation to his Auld Mare, Maggie.” 

2 The Smithy of the Cyclops is described in the Odyssey, 
Book IX; the yoking of Priam’s Chariot in the Iliad , Book 
XXIV. 

3 In Burns’s poem, “Scotch Drink,” the blacksmith is 
called Burnewin, probably, as Carlyle implies, a corruption 
of Burn-the-Wind. 

4 Carlyle is quoting from memory apparently and not very 
accurately. The lines are in “Open the Door to Me, Oh!” 
and read: 

“The wan moon is setting behind the white wave 
And time is setting wi’ me, oh! 

False friends, false love, farewell! for mair 
I’ll ne’er trouble them, nor thee, oh!” 



Carlyle’s Essay on Burns 


29 


our understanding, our imagination, our affections? 
Yet it is not in itself, perhaps, a very high excellence; 
but capable of being united indifferently with the 
strongest, or with ordinary powers. Homer surpasses 
all men in this quality: but strangely enough, at no 
great distance below him are Richardson and Defoe. 
It belongs, in truth, to what is called a lively mind; 
and gives no sure indication of the higher endow¬ 
ments that may exist along with it. In all the three 
cases we have mentioned, it is combined with great 
garrulity; their descriptions are detailed, ample, and 
lovingly exact; Homer’s fire bursts through, from time 
to time, as if by accident; but Defoe and Richardson 
have no fire. Burns, again, is not more distinguished 
by the clearness than by the impetuous force of his 
conceptions. Of the strength, the piercing emphasis 
with which he thought, his emphasis of exrrensio^ 
give a humble but the readiest proof. Who ever uttered 
sharper sayings than his; words more memorable, 
now by their burning vehemence, now by their cool 
vigour and laconic pith? A single phrase depicts a 
whole subject, a whole scene. We hear of ‘a gentle¬ 
man that derived his patent of nobility direct from 
Almighty God.’ 1 Our Scottish forefathers in the bat¬ 
tle-field struggled forward ‘red-wat-shod:’ in this one 
word, a full vision of horror and carnage, perhaps too 
frightfully accurate for Art! 

21. In fact, one of the leading features in the 


’Carlyle is quoting from, Burns in reference to Captain 
Matthew Henderson, but Burns wrote, “a gentleman who 
held the patent for his Honors immediately from Almighty 
God.” Carlyle’s wife, in a letter written before their mar¬ 
riage, used the expression of Carlyle himself, but he did 
not know this fact until her death, long after this essay was 
written. 





30 


Carlyle's Essay on Burns 


mind of Burns is this vigour of his strictly intel¬ 
lectual perceptions. A resolute force is ever visible 
in his judgments, as in his feelings and volitions. 
Professor Stewart says of him, with some surprise: 
‘All the faculties of Burns’s mind were, as far as I 
could judge, equally vigorous; and his predilection for 
poetry was rather the result of his own enthusiastic 
and impassioned temper, than of a genius exclusively 
adapted to that species of composition. From his con¬ 
versation I should have pronounced him to be fitted 
to excel in whatever walk of ambition he had chosen 
to exert his abilities.’ But this, if we mistake not, is 
at all times the very essence of a truly poetical en¬ 
dowment. Poetry, except in such cases as that of 
Keats, where the whole consists in a weak-eyed maud¬ 
lin sensibility, and a certain vague random tuneful¬ 
ness of nature, 1 is no separate faculty, no organ which 
can be superadded to the rest, or disjoined from them; 
but rather the result of their general harmony and 
completion. The feelings, the gifts, that exist in the 
Poet, are those that exist, with more or less develop¬ 
ment, in every human soul: the imagination, which 
shudders at the Hell of Dante, is the same faculty, 
weaker in degree, which called that picture into being. 
How does the Poet speak to men, with power, but by 
being still more a man than they? Shakspeare, it 
has been well observed, in the planning and completing 


the Edbiburgh Review edition the adjective “extreme” 
is used in place of “weak-eyed” and “maudlin,” and the 
adjective “pervading” in place of “random.” It is sup¬ 
posed that the editor, Jeffrey, softened the expressions out 
of respect for Keats, &nd that Carlyle restored his original 
wording when the essay was republished. Carlyle is in¬ 
tolerably unfair to Keats, who has a very high rank among 
English poets. 



Carlyle's Essay on Burns 


31 


of his tragedies, has shown an Understanding, were it 
nothing more, which might have governed states, or 
indited a Novum Organum. 1 What Burns’s force of 
understanding may have been, we have less means of 
judging: it had to dwell among the humblest objects; 
never saw Philosophy, never rose, except by natural 
effort and for short intervals, into the region of great 
ideas. Nevertheless, sufficient indication, if no proof 
sufficient, remains for us in his works: we discern 
the brawny movements of a gigantic though untutored 
strength, and can understand how, in conversation, 
his quick sure insight into men and things may, as 
much as aught else about him, have amazed the best 
thinkers of his time and country. 

22. But, unless we mistake, the intellectual gift 
of Burns is fine aswell as strong. The more delicate 
relations of things could not well have escaped his 
eye, for they were intimately present to his heart. 
The logic of the senate and the forum 2 is indispen¬ 
sable, but not all-sufficient; nay, perhaps the highest 
Truth is that which will the most certainly elude it. 
For this logic works by words, and ‘the highest/ it 
has been said, ‘cannot be expressed in words.’ We 
are not without token of an openness for this higher 
truth also, of a keen though uncultivated sense for 
it, having existed in Burns. Mr. Stewart, it will be 
remembered, ‘wonders/ in the passage above quoted, 


a The great philosophical treatise of the English philos¬ 
opher, Francis Bacon (1561-1626). The statement is per¬ 
haps a little extravagant, but not so absurd as the belief of 
some misguided persons that Bacon wrote Shakspeare’s 
plays. 

2 The forum in ancient Rome was originally the market¬ 
place, but as the law-courts were held there, the phrase 
“logic of the forum” probably means “logic of the law- 

court.” 



32 


Carlyle's Essay on Burns 


that Burns had formed some distinct conception of 
the ‘doctrine of association.’ 1 We rather think that 
far subtler things than the doctrine of association 
had from of old been familiar to him. Here for in¬ 
stance : 

‘We know nothing,’ thus writes he, ‘or next to noth¬ 
ing, of the structure of our souls, so we cannot ac¬ 
count for those seeming caprices in them, that one 
should be particularly pleased with this thing, or 
struck with that, which, on minds of a different cast, 
makes no extraordinary impression. I have some fa¬ 
vourite flowers in spring, among which the mountain- 
daisy, the harebell, the foxglove, the wild-brier rose, 
the budding birch, and the hoary hawthorn, that 1 
view and hang over with particular delight. I never 
hear the loud solitary whistle of the curlew in a 
summer noon, or the wild mixing cadence of a troop 
of gray plover in an autumnal morning, without feel¬ 
ing an elevation of soul like the enthusiasm of de¬ 
votion or poetry. Tell me, my dear friend, to what 
can this be owing? Are we a piece of machinery, 
which, like the Aeolian harp, passive, takes the im¬ 
pression of the passing accident; or do these work¬ 
ings argue something within us above the trodden 
clod? I own myself partial to such proofs of those 
awful and important realities: a God that made all 
things, man’s immaterial and immortal nature, and 
a world of weal or wo beyond death and the grave.’ 

23. Force and fineness of understanding are often 

3 The so-called law of thought by which one idea will sug¬ 
gest another closely associated with it. This remark of 
Professor Stewart’s is not in the quotation previously given 
by Carlyle, but is in the passage cited from Stewart by 
Lockhart. The long quotation from Burns in this para¬ 
graph is a part of a letter of his to Mrs. Dunlop printed 
in Lockhart’s Life (pp. 196, 197). 



Carlyle's Essay on Burns 


33 


spoken of as something different from general force 
and fineness of nature, as something partly independ¬ 
ent of them. The necessities of language so require 
it; but in truth these qualities are not distinct and 
independent: except in special cases, and from special 
causes, they ever go together. A man of strong un¬ 
derstanding is generally a man of strong character; 
neither is delicacy in the one kind often divided from 
delicacy in the other. No one, at all events, is ig¬ 
norant that in the Poetry of Burns, keenness of in¬ 
sight keeps pace with keenness of feeling; that his 
light is not more pervading than his warmth. He is 
!T~man of the most impassioned temper; with pas¬ 
sions not strong only, but noble, and of the sort in 
which great virtues and great poems take their rise. 
It is reverence, it is love towards all Nature that in¬ 
spires him, that opens his eyes to its beauty, and 
makes heart and voice eloquent in its praise. There 
is a true old saying, that ‘Love furthers knowledge:’ 
but above all, it is the living essence of that knowl¬ 
edge which makes poets; the first principle of its ex¬ 
istence, increase, activity. Of Burns’s fervid affec¬ 
tion, his generous all-embracing Love, we have spoken 
already, as of the grand distinction of his nature, 
seen equally in word and deed, in his Life and in his 
Writings. It were" easy to multiply examples. Not 
man only, but all that environs man in the material 
and moral universe, is lovely in his sight; ‘the hoary 
hawthorn,’ the ‘troop of gray plover,’ the ‘solitary 
curlew,’ all are dear to him; all live in this Earth 
along with him, and to all he is knit as in mysterious 
brotherhood. How touching is it, for instance, that, 
amidst the gloom of personal misery, brooding oyer 
the wintry desolation without him and within him, 


’Old subjunctive. We should say,. “It would be easy.’ 



34 


Carlyle's Essay on Burns 


he thinks of the ‘ourie cattle,’ and ‘silly sheep,’ and 
their sufferings in the pitiless storm! 1 2 

I thought me on the ourie cattle, 

Or silly sheep, wha bide his brattle 
O’ wintry war; 

Or thro’ the drift, deep-lairing, sprattle. 
Beneath a scaur. 

Ilk happing bird, wee helpless thing, 

That in the merry months o’ spring 
Delighted me to hear thee sing, 

What comes o’ thee? 

Where wilt thou cow’r, thy chittering wing, 

And close thy e’e? 

The tenant of the mean hut, with its ‘ragged roof 
and chinky wall,’ 3 has a heart to pity even these! 
This is worth several homilies on Mercy: for it is the 
voice of Mercy herself. Burns, indeed, lives in sym¬ 
pathy; his soul rushes forth into all realms of being; 
nothing that has existence can be indifferent to him. 
The very Devil he cannot hate with right orthodoxy: 

3 But fare you well, auld Nickie-ben; 

0, wad ye tak a thought and men’! 

Ye aiblins might,—I dinna ken,— 

Still hae a stake; 

I’m wae to think upo’ yon den. 

Even for your sake! 

24. “He is the father of curses and lies,” said Dr. 
Slop; “and is cursed and damned already”—“I am 


’Quotation from Burn’s poem, “A Winter Night.” 

2 Another quotation from the same poem. 

s From Burn’s “Address to the Deil.” 



Carlyle's Essay on Burns 


35 


sorry for it,” quoth my uncle Toby! 1 —A Poet with¬ 
out Love, 2 were a physical and metaphysical impossi¬ 
bility. 

25. 3 But has it not been said in contradiction to 
this principle, that, ‘Indignation makes verses' V It 
has been so said, and is true enough: but the con¬ 
tradiction is apparent, not real. The Indignation 
which makes verses is, properly speaking, an inverted 
Love; the love of some right, some worth, some good¬ 
ness, belonging to ourselves or others, which has 
been injured, and which this tempestuous feeling is¬ 
sues forth to defend and avenge. No selfish fury of 
heart, existing there as a primary feeling, and with¬ 
out its opposite, ever produced much Poetry: other¬ 
wise, we suppose, the Tiger were the most musical of 
all our choristers. Johnson said, he loved a good 
hater; 1 by which he must have meant, not so much 
one that hated violently, as one that hated wisely; 
hated baseness from love of nobleness. However, in 
spite of Johnson’s paradox, tolerable enough for once 
in speech, but which need not have been, so often 
adopted in print since then, we rather believe that 
good men deal sparingly in hatred, either wise or 

1 From Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759-61). 
Uncle Toby is a very lovable person, a famous character 
in fiction. His sympathy is, like Burns’s, so great that it 
extends even to the Devil. 

Subjunctive: compare with “It were easy” in paragraph 
23, also with “the Tjger were” in paragraph 25. 

’Paragraphs 25 and 26 are not in the Edinburgh Review 
edition. 

Muvenal, Satires, I, 79: “Si natura negat, facit indignatio 
versum “If nature refuses, indignation makes the verse.” 

This statement is often attributed to Samuel Johnson, 
but what he said was, “Dear Bathurst was a man to my 
very heart’s content: he hated a fool, and he hated a rogue, 
and he hated a Whig; he was a very good hater.” (From 
Mrs. Piozzi’s Anecdotes of Dr. Samuel Johnson.) 



36 


Carlyle's Essay on Burns 


unwise: nay that a ‘good' hater is still a desider¬ 
atum 1 in this world. The Devil, at least, who passes 
for the chief and best of that class, is said to be 
nowise an amiable character. 

26. Of the verses which Indignation makes, 
Burns has also given us specimens: and among the 
best that were ever given. Who will forget his 
‘Dweller in yon Dungeon dark'; 2 a piece that might 
have been chaunted by the Furies of Aeschylus? 3 
The secrets of the infernal Pit are laid bare; a 
boundless baleful ‘darkness visible’; 4 and streaks of 
hell-fire quivering madly in its black haggard bosom. 

Dweller in yon Dungeon dark, 

Hangman of Creation, mark! 

Who in widow’s weeds appears, 

Laden with unhonoured years, 

Noosing with care a bursting purse, 

Baited with many a deadly curse? 

27. Why should we speak of Scots, wha hae wi 
Wallace bled;* since all know of it, from the king to 

What Carlyle means is that goodness in a hater or in 
hatred is very rare—probably non-existent. 

2 The first line of Burns’s “Ode, Sacred to the Memory of 
Mrs. Oswald.” 

3 Aeschylus (425-456 B. C.), one of the great tragic dram¬ 
atists of ancient Greece. The Furies were Greek goddesses 
who carried out the vengeance of the gods against sinning 
mortals; they form the Chorus in Aeschylus’s tragedy of 
The Eumenides. 

4 Milton, Paradise Lost, I. 63. 

*The first line of Burns’s poem. “Bruce’s Address at Ban¬ 
nockburn.” The victory of the Scots under Robert Bruce 
over the English at Bannockburn in 1314 secured the in¬ 
dependence of Scotland. William Wallace was the first 
leader of the Scots in their struggle against the English 
authority. In this poem Burns imagines Bruce addressing 
his soldiers before the battle. 



Carlyle's Essay on Burns 


37 


the meanest of his subjects? This dithyrambic was 
composed on horseback; in riding in the middle of 
tempests, over the wildest Galloway moor, in com¬ 
pany with a Mr. Syme, who, observing the poet’s 
looks, forbore to speak,—judiciously enough, for a 
man composing Bruce's Address might be unsafe to 
trifle with. Doubtless this stern hymn was singing 
itself, as he formed it, through the soul of Burns: 
but to the j^ernal ear, it should be sung with the 
throat of the whirlwind. So long as there is warm 
blood in the heart of Scotchman or man, it will move 
in fierce thrills under this war-ode; the best, we be¬ 
lieve, that was ever writterTby any pen. 

28. Another wild stormful 3ong, that dwells in 
our ear and mind with a strange tenacity, is Mac - 
pherson’s Farewell. 1 2 Perhaps there is something in 
the tradition itself that that co-operates. For was 
not this grim Celt, this shaggy Northland Cacus, 3 
that ‘lived a life of sturt and strife, and died by 
treacherie,’ 3 —was not he too one of the Nimrods 4 and 
Napoleons of the earth, in the arena of his own re¬ 
mote misty glens, for want of a clearer and wider 
one? Nay, was there not a touch of grace given 

Barnes Macpherson, a Highland outlaw, was hanged in 
Edinburgh in 1700. The tradition was that he composed an 
air and played it on the bag-pipes on his way to execution. 
Burns wrote a song to this air, called “Macpherson’s Fare¬ 
well.” 

2 The Highland Scots, like the Irish, the Welsh, and the 
inhabitants of Brittany in France, belong to the Celtic race. 
Cacus was a giant killed by Hercules; the resemblance be¬ 
tween him and Macpherson lies in the fact that they both 
stole cattle. 

s Quoted indirectly from the poem. 

4 Nimrod was the reputed founder of Babylon. In Genesis 
X:8-10, he is called “a mighty one in the earth” and “a 
mighty hunter before the Lord.” 



38 


Carlyle's Essay on Burns 


him? A fibre of love and softness, of poetry itself, 
must have lived in his savage heart: for he composed 
that air the night before his execution; on the wings 
of that poor melody, his better soul would soar away 
above oblivion, pain, and all the ignominy and de¬ 
spair, which, like an avalanche, was hurling him in¬ 
to the abyss! Here also, as at Thebes, and in 
Pelops’ line, was material Fate matched against 
man’s Free-will; 1 matched in bitterest though ob¬ 
scure duel; and the ethereal soul sank not, even in its 
blindness, without a cry which has survived it. But 
who, except Burns, could have given words to such a 
soul: words that we never listen to without a strange 
half-barbarous, half-poetic fellow-feeling? 

2 Sae rantingly, sae wantonly, 

Sae dauntingly gaed he; 

He play'd a spring, and danced it round, 

Below the gallows-tree. 

29. Under a lighter disguise, the same principle 
of Love, which we have recognised as the great 
characteristic of Burns, and of all true poets, occas¬ 
ionally manifests itself in the shape of Humour. 
Everywhere, indeed, in his sunny moods, a full buoy- 


^ilton in II Penseroso, 11. 99, 100, refers to Greek trage¬ 
dy as 

“Presenting Thebes, or Pelops’ line, 

Or the tale of Troy divine.” 

The main subjects of Greek tragedy dealt with the his¬ 
tory of the city of Thebes, with the misfortunes of the 
descendants of Pelops, and with the incidents growing out 
of the Trojan war. The central theme of these dramas 
was the struggle of human beings against Fate. The 
exact meaning of the adjective “material” as applied to 
Fate here is a little obscure. Carlyle probably means that 
Fate governs matter only and has no control over the soul. 
2 Chorus of the poem. 



Carlyle’s Essay on Burns 


39 


ant flood of mirth rolls through the mind of Burns; 
he rises to the high, and stoops to the low, and is 
brother and playmate to all Nature. We speak not 
of his bold and often irresistible faculty of caricature; 
for this is Drollery rather than Humour: but a much 
tenderer sportfulness dwells in him; and comes forth 
here and there, in evanescent and beautiful touches; 
as in his Address to the Mouse, or the Farmer's Mare, 
or in his Elegy on poor Mailie, which last may be 
reckoned his happiest of this kind. In these pieces, 
there are traits of a Humour as fine as that of 
Sterne; yet altogether different, original, peculiar,— 
the Humour of Burns. 

30. Of the tenderness, the playful pathos, and 
many other kindred qualities of Burns’s Poetry, much 
more might be said; but now, with these poor out¬ 
lines of a sketch, we must prepare to quit this part 
of our subject. To speak of his individual Writings, 
adequately, and with any detail, would lead us far 
beyond our limits. As already hinted, we can look 
on but few of these pieces as, in strict critical lan¬ 
guage, deserving the name~ of Poems: they are 
rhymed eloquence, rhymed pathos, rhymed sense; yet 
seldom essentially melodious, aerial, poetical. Tam o' 
ShanteF itself, which enjoys so high a favour, does 
not appear to us, at all decisively, to come under this 


Generally regarded—(and rightly—as one of Burns’s most 
successful poems. Carlyle’s criticism is not very sound. 
He seems to demand a serious handling of subject-matter in 
a poem designedly humorous. His inability to appreciate 
this work is due to his romanticism; Burns, while he had 
romantic tendencies, is, in Tam o’ Shanter, fundamentally a 
realist and a satirist. He probably intended to create just 
the incongruous impression, the “drunken phantasmagoria” 
that Carlyle complains of. 



40 


Carlyle's Essay on Burns 


last catagory. 1 It is not so much a poem, as a piece 
of sparkling rhetoric; the heart and body of the story 
still lies hard and dead. He has not gone back, much 
less carried us back, into that dark, earnest, wonder¬ 
ing age, when the tradition was believed, and when 
it took its rise; he does not attempt, by any new- 
modelling of his supernatural ware, to strike anew 
that deep mysterious chord of human nature, which 
once responded to such things; and which lives in us 
too, and will for ever live, though silent now, or 
vibrating with far other notes, and to far different 
issues. Our German readers will understand us, 
when we say, that he is not the Tieck but the Masaus 
of this tale. Externally it is all green and living; 
yet look closer, it is no firm growth, but only ivy on a 
rock. The piece does not properly cohere: the 
strange chasm which yawns in our incredulous imag¬ 
inations between the Ayr public-house and the gate 
of Tophet, is nowhere bridged over, nay the idea of 
such a bridge is laughed at; and thus the Tragedy 
of the adventure becomes a mere drunken phantasma¬ 
goria, or many-coloured spectrum painted on ale- 
vapours, and the Farce alone has any reality. We do 
not say that Burns should have made much more of 
this tradition; we rather think that, for strictly poet¬ 
ical purposes, not much was to be made of it. Neither 
are we blind to the deep, varied, genial power dis¬ 
played in what he has actually accomplished; but we 
find far more ‘Shakspearean’ qualities, as these of 
Tam o’ Shanter have been fondly named, 2 in many of 
his other pieces; nay, we incline to believe, that this 
latter might have been written, all but quite as well, 

ir The category—fundamental classification—of “essentially 
poetical.” 

a See quotation from Lockhart in the “Introduction.” 



Carlyle's Essay on Burns 


41 


by a man who, in place of genius, had only possessed 
talent. 

31. Perhaps we may venture to say, that the most 
strictly poetical of all his ‘poems’ is one, which does 
not appear in Currie’s Edition; but has been often 
printed before and since, under the humble title of 
The Jolly Beggars .* The subject truly is among the 
lowest in Nature; but it only the more shows our 
Poet’s gift in raising it into the domain of Art. To 
our minds, this piece seems thoroughly compacted; 
melted together, refined; and poured forth in one 
flood of true liquid harmony. It is light, airy, soft of 
movement; yet sharp and precise in its details; every 
face is a portrait: that raucle carlin, that wee Apollo, 
that Son of Mars, are Scottish, yet ideal; the scene is 
at once a dream, and the very Ragcastle of ‘Poosie- 
Nansie.’ Farther, it seems in a considerable degree 
complete, a real self-supporting Whole, which is the 
highest merit in a poem. The blanket of the Night 
is drawn asunder for a momentj in full, ruddy, flam¬ 
ing light, these rough tatterdemalions are seen in 
their boisterous revel; for the strong pulse of life 
vindicates its right to gladness even here; and when 
the curtain closes, we prolong the action, without ef¬ 
fort; the next day as the last, our Caird and our Bal- 
ladmonger are singing and soldering; their ‘brats 


^his poem is an account of a revel in a Scottish tavern, 
during which various characters present sing songs typical 
of their ways of life and their personalities. Some of these 
characters are named here: the wee Apollo is the fiddler 
who gets his nickname from the Greek god of music; the 
Son of Mars is the soldier, Mars being the Roman god of 
war; L./osie-Nansie is the tavern-keeper; the Caird is a 
tinker or traveling mender of pots and pans; the Ballad- 
monger is a person who goes about singing and selling bal¬ 
lads. There is no doubt that the poem is, as Carlyle says, a 
jnasterpiece. 



42 


Carlyle’s Essay on Burns 


and callets’ are hawking, begging, cheating; and 
some other night, in new combinations, they will 
wring from Fate another hour of wassail and good 
cheer. Apart from the universal sympathy with man 
which this again bespeaks in Burns, a genuine in¬ 
spiration and no inconsiderable technical talent are 
manifested here. There is the fidelity, humour, 
warm life, and accurate painting and grouping of 
some Teniers, for whom hostlers and carousing peas¬ 
ants are not without significance. It would be 
strange, doubtless, to call this the best of Burns’s 
writings: we mean to say only, that it seems to. us 
the most perfect of its kind, as a piece of poetical 
composition, strictly so called. In the Beggar’s 
Opera, in the Beggar’s Bush? as other critics have 
already remarked, there is nothing which, in real 
poetic vigour equals this Cantata; nothing, as we 
think, which comes within many degrees of it. 

32. But by far the most finished, complete, and 
truly inspired pieces of Burns are, without dispute, 
to be found among his gongs. It is here that, al¬ 
though through a small aperture, 1 2 his light shines 
with least obstruction; in its highest beauty and 
pure sunny clearness. The reason may be, that 
Song is a brief simple species of composition; and 
requires nothing so much for its perfection, as gen- 


1 The Beggar's Opera by John Gay (1727) is a singing 
play in which the principal characters are thieves, highway¬ 
men, and jailers. It was very popular for many years and 
has been put on the stage again in recent times. The Beg¬ 
gar's Bush by John Fletcher (1622) is another play of low 
life, but considerably less important than the first-named. 
The “remark” from “other critics” is undoubtedly a ref¬ 
erence to Lockhart’s Life. (See Introduction.) 

2 Probably a reference to the brevity of each separate 
song rather than to the importance of the songs taken 
together. 



Carlyle's Essay on Burns 


43 


uine poetic feeling, genuine music of heart. Yet the 
Song has its rules equally with the Tragedy; rules 
which in most cases are poorly fulfilled, in many 
cases are not so much as felt. We might write a 
long essay on the Songs of Burns; which we reckon 
by far the best that Britain has yet produced: for, 
indeed, since the era of Queen Elizabeth, we know 
not that, by any other hand, aught truly worth at¬ 
tention has been accomplished in this department. 1 2 
True, we have songs enough ‘by persons of quality;’ 1 
we have tawdry, hollow, wine-bred madrigals; many 
a rhymed speech ‘in the flowing and watery vein of 
Ossorius the Portugal Bishop,’ 3 rich in sonorous 
words, and, for moral, dashed perhaps with some tint 
of a sentimental sensuality; all which many persons 
cease not from endeavouring to sing; though for most 
part, we fear, the music is but from the throat out¬ 
wards, or at best from some region far enough short 
of the Soul; not in which, but in a certain inane Lim¬ 
bo of the Fancy, or even in some vaporous debatable 
land on the outskirts of the Nervous System, 4 most of 
such madrigals and rhymed speeches seem to have or¬ 
iginated. 

a The Elizabethan Age is famous for its beautiful songs. 
See those in Shakespeare’s plays for example; in song¬ 
writing Shakespeare did not excel the rest of his con¬ 
temporaries so greatly as in the drama. 

2 In the days when professional authorship was thought 
somewhat degrading to a lady or a gentleman of high social 
position, poems and other pieces of literature were some¬ 
times printed anonymously as ‘‘by a person of quality.” 

3 Quoted from Bacon’s Advancement of Learning; Bacon 
is criticizing empty and artificial elegance of style, and 
cites Ossorius (16th century), who wrote in Latin, as an 
example. 

4 Limbo was, in the Middle Ages, supposed to be an other- 
world place located somewhere between Heaven and Hell; 



44 


Carlyle's Essay on Burns 


33. With the Songs of Burns we must not name 
these things. Independently of the clear, manly, 
heartfelt sentiment that ever pervades his poetry, his 
Songs are honest in another point of view; in form, 
as well as in spirit. They do not affect to be set to 
music, but they actually and in themselves are music; 
they have received their life, and fashioned them¬ 
selves together, in the medium of Harmony, as 
Venus rose from the bosom of the sea. 1 The story, 
the feeling, is not detailed, but suggested; not said, 
or spouted, in rhetorical completeness and coherence; 
but sung, in fitful gushes, in glowing hints, in fan¬ 
tastic breaks, in warblings not of the voice only, but 
of the whole mind. We consider this to be the es¬ 
sence of a song; and that no songs since the little 
careless catches, and, as it were, drops of song, which 
Shakspeare has here and there sprinkled over his 
plays, fulfil this condition in nearly the same degree 
as most of Burns’s do. Such grace and truth of ex¬ 
ternal movement, too, presupposes in general a cor¬ 
responding force and truth of sentiment and inward 
meaning. The songs of Burns are not more perfect 
in the former quality than in the latter. With what 
tenderness he sings, yet with what vehemence and 
entireness! There is a piercing wail in his sorrow, 
the purest rapture in his joy; he burns with the 
sternest ire, or laughs with the loudest or slyest 
mirth; and yet he is sweet and soft, ‘sweet as the 

the “debatable land” was the country between England and 
Scotland, the ownership of which was in dispute before the 
union of the two kingdoms. In other words, these songs 
are so worthless that they seem to come from some faculty 
of the author which is hardly a part of the mind at all. 

B This was the origin, according to Greek myth, of the 
goddess of love and beauty, called by the Greeks Aphrodite 
and by the Romans Venus. 



Carlyle's Essay on Burns 


45 


smile when fond lovers meet, and soft as their part¬ 
ing tear. If we farther take into account the im¬ 
mense variety of his subjects; how, from the loud 
flowing revel in Willie brew’d a Peck o’ Maut, to 
the still, rapt enthusiasm of sadness for Mary in 
Heaven; from the jglad kind greeting of Auld Lang - 
syne, or the comic archness of Duncan Gray, to the 
fire-eyed fury of Scots wha hae wi ’ Wallace bled/ 
he has found a tone and words for every mood of 
man’s heart,—it will seem small praise if we rank 
him as the first of all our Song-writers; for we know 
not where to find one worthy of being second to him. 

34. It is on his Songs, as we believe, that Burns’s 
chief influence as an~author will ultimately be found 
to depend: nor, if our Fletcher’s 2 aphorism is true, 
shall we account this a small influence. ‘Let me make 
the songs of a people,’ said he, ‘and you shall make 
its laws.’ Surely, if ever any Poet might have 
equalled himself with Legislators, on this ground, it 
was Burns. His Songs are already part of the 
mother-tongue, not of Scotland only but of Britain, 
and of the millions that in all ends of the earth speak 
a British language. In hut and hall, as the heart 
unfolds itself in many-coloured joy and woe of ex¬ 
istence, the name , the voice of that joy and that woe, 
is the name'and voice which Burns has given them. 
Strictly speaking, perhaps no British man has so 
deeply affected the thoughts and feelings of so many 
men, as this solitary and altogether private individu¬ 
al, with means apparently the humblest. 

35. In another point of view, moreover, we in- 


lr The references in this sentence are all to various songs 
of Burns. 

’Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun (1653-1716). Carlyle per¬ 
haps calls him “our Fletcher” because he was Scotch; 

there were several famous English Fletchers. 



46 


Carlyle's Essay on Burns 


dine to think that Burns’s influence may have been 
considerable: we mean, as exerted specially on the 
Literature of his country, at least on the Literature 
of Scotland. Among the great changes which Brit¬ 
ish, particularly Scottish literature, has undergone 
since that period, one of the greatest will be found 
to consist in its remarkable increase of nationality. 
Even the English writers, most popular in Burns’s 
time, were little distinguished for their literary pa¬ 
triotism, in this its best sense. A certain attenuated 
cosmopolitanism had, in good measure, taken place 
of the old insular home-feeling; 1 literature was, as it 
were, without any local environment; was not nour¬ 
ished by the affections which spring from a native 
soil. Our Grays and our Glovers 2 seemed to write 
almost as if in vacuo; the thing written bears no 
mark of place; it is not written so much for English¬ 
men, as for men; or rather, which is the inevitable 
result of this, for certain Generalisations which 
philosophy termed men. Goldsmith is an exception: 

1 Cosmopolitanism is defined as a freedom from local at¬ 
tachments and prejudices; the genuine cosmopolitan has no 
preferences for his own country over any others. Carlyle 
thinks that this attitude implies a very “thin” and cold 
nature. Insular , which means literally pertaining to an 
island, is generally used in a bad sense of the narrow 
prejudices supposed to be characteristic of islanders, es¬ 
pecially of the British. Carlyle uses it here in a favor¬ 
able sense, as suggesting patriotic and bome-loving. 

’Richard Glover (1712-1785), author of Leonidas and 
other poems, a very insignificant writer, ought not to be 
coupled with Thomas Gray (1716-1771), author of An 
Elegy in a Country Churchyard, etc., a much greater poet. 
Carlyle is unfair to Gray; his poems, though saturated with 
classical learning, display genuine interest In British 
themes and backgrounds. 



Carlyle's Essay on Burns 


47 


not so Johnson; 1 the scene of his Rambler is little 
more English than that of his Rasselas. 

36. But if such was, in some degree, the case 
with England, it was, in the highest degree, the case 
with Scotland. In fact, our Scottish literature had, 
at that period, a very singular aspect; unexampled, 
so far as we know, except perhaps at Geneva, 2 where 
the same state of matters appears still to continue. 
For a long period after Scotland became British, we 
had no literature: at the date when Addison and 
Steele were writing their Spectators , our good John 
Boston was writing, with the noblest intent, but 
alike in defiance of grammar and philosophy, his 
Fourfold State of Man. 3 Then came the schisms in 


'Carlyle evidently refers to Goldsmith’s Deserted Vil¬ 
lage. a poem describing English country life. He is again 
unfair to Johnson. No one could have been more char¬ 
acteristically English in his feelings and ideas than Sam¬ 
uel Johnson. The Rambler is a collection of essays; Ras¬ 
selas is a story, the scene of which is laid in Africa. 

“Geneva in the 16th, 17th, and ISth centuries offered a 
safe home for political and religious refugees from other 
lands. Its culture was largely due to these exiles. 

’“Scotland became British,” in 1603, when James VI of 
Scotland ascended the English throne as James I. Before 
this time the Scots had had a national literature of their 
own. The supremacy of England reduced the Scottish 
speech to the level of an unliterary dialect. The few 
Scotchmen who tried to write literature in the 17th 
century wrote in English, which was reaily an acquired 
tongue. The bad English spoken by Scotchmen was 
proverbial in England until the latter part of the 18th 
century. The Spectator essays (1711-12) written by Ad¬ 
dison and Steele and including the famous Sir Roger de 
Coverley Papers , represent the perfection of English prose 
style. Carlyle cites them to contrast with their good 
English the bad English of contemporary Scottish writers, 



48 


Carlyle's Essay on Burns 


our National Church, and the fiercer schisms in our 
Body Politic : 1 Theologic ink, and Jacobite blood, with 
gail enough in both cases, seemed to have blotted out 
the intellect of the country; however, it was only 
obscured, not obliterated. Lord Karnes made nearly 
the first attempt at writing English; and ere long, 
Hume, Robertson, Smith , 2 and a whole host of follow¬ 
ers, attracted hither the eyes of all Europe. And yet 
in this brilliant resuscitation of our ‘fervid genius ,’ 3 
there was nothing truly Scottish, nothing indigenous; 
except, perhaps, the natural impetuosity of intellect, 
which we sometimes claim, and are sometimes up¬ 
braided with, as a characteristic of our nation. It is 
curious to remark that Scotland, so full of writers, 
had no Scottish culture, nor indeed any English; our 


as represented by the insignificant “John” Boston, whose 
real name was not John, but Thomas. 

'The schisms in the Church were due to the struggle be¬ 
tween Presbyterianism and Episcopacy; the schisms in the 
‘ Body Politic” to the rebellions of the Jacobites, a name 
given in both England and Scotland to.those who wished 
to restore to the throne the Stuart line of kings, dethroned 
in 16S8 on account of the tyranny of James II. The name 
comes from the Latin form of James, Jacobus. As the 
Stuarts were Scotch in origin, the Jacobites were espec¬ 
ially strong in Scotland, and their rebellions, particularly 
the great rebellion of 1745, occasioned much bloodshed and 
bitter feeling. 

2 For these and other proper names in this paragraph, 
see Glossary. 

3 The famous phrase, “proefervidum ingenium Scotor- 
utu." the “very fervid genius (or native ability) of the 
Scots ,” occurs in the History of Scotland by George Buch¬ 
anan (1505-82). Buchanan wrote in Latin, which was the 
usual language of learning in those days. 



Carlyle's Essay on Burns 


49 


culture was almost exclusively French. 1 It was by 
studying Racine and Voltaire, Batteux and Boileau, 
that Kames had trained himself to be a critic and 
philosopher; it was the light of Montesquieu and 
Mably that guided Robertson in his political specula¬ 
tions; Quesnay’s lamp that kindled the lamp of Adam 
Smith. Hume was too rich a man to borrow; and 
perhaps he reacted on the French more than he was 
acted on by them: but neither had he aught to do 
with Scotland; Edinburgh, equally with La Fleche, 
was but the lodging and laboratory, in which he not 
so much morally lived , as metaphysically investigated. 
Never, perhaps, was there a class of writers so clear 
and well-ordered, yet so totally destitute, to all ap¬ 
pearance, of any patriotic affection, nay of any hu¬ 
man affection whatever. 2 The French wits of the 
period were as unpatriotic: but their general deficien¬ 
cy in moral principle, not to say their avowed sensu¬ 
ality and unbelief in all virtue, strictly so called, ren¬ 
der this accountable enough. We hope there is a 
patriotism founded on something better than preju¬ 
dice; that our country may be dear to us, without 
injury to our philosophy; that in loving and prizing 

during the long struggle of Scotland with England, the 
natural ally of the former was France. Hence, the ties of 
association between France and Scotland were close, and 
the French influence in the poorer and more backward 
country was very great. This influence lasted, to a certain 
extent, through the 18th century, but Carlyle probably ex¬ 
aggerates it—-especially the influence of Quesnay on Adam 
Smith. 

2 Hume was, as Carlyle says, a man who displayed an 
extraordinary lack of any human emotion. The statement 
seems to be less true of Smith and Robertson, the nature 
of whose subject-matter forebade any emotionalism in 
their writings. 



50 


Carlyle's Essay on Burns 


all other lands, we may prize justly, and yet love be¬ 
fore all others, our own stern Motherland, and the 
venerable Structure of social and moral Life, which 
Mind has through long ages been building up for us 
there. Surely there is nourishment for the better 
part of man’s heart in all this: surely the roots, that 
have fixed themselves in the very core of man’s being, 
may be so cultivated as to grow up not into briers, 
but into roses, in the field of his life! Our Scottish 
sages have no such propensities: the field of their life 
shows neither briers nor roses; but only a flat, con¬ 
tinuous thrashing-floor for Logic, whereon all ques¬ 
tions, from the ‘Doctrine of Rent/ to the ‘Natural 
History of Religion, 1 are thrashed and sifted with 
the same mechanical impartiality! 

37. With Sir Walter Scott at the head of our litera¬ 
ture/ it cannot be denied that much of this evil is 
past* or rapidly passing away: our chief literary men, 
whatever other faults they may have, no longer live 
among us like a French Colony, or some knot of Propa¬ 
ganda Missionaries; but like natural-born subjects of 
the soil, partaking and sympathising in all our at¬ 
tachments, humours and habits. Our literature no 
longer grows in water, but in mould, and with the 

’Title of a work by Hume; Adam Smith discussed the 
'‘Doctrine of Rent.” 

2 Carlyle here pays a tribute to the use by Sir Walter 
Scott of native Scotch subject-matter, thougn he did not 
much admire Scott’s works. His essay on Sir Walter 
Scott, published in the Edinburgh Review in 1838, con¬ 
tains more unfavorable than favorable criticism of Scott 
as a writer, but several hearty tributes to him as a man, 
notably this, at the close: “When he departed, he took a 
Man’s life along with him. No sounder piece of British 
manhood was put together in that eighteenth century of 
Time.” 



Carlyle’s Essay on Burns 


51 


true racy virtues of the soil and climate. How much 
of this change may be due to Burns, or to any other 
individual, it might be difficult to estimate. Direct 
literary imitation of Burns was not to be looked for. 
But his example, in the fearless adoption of domestic 
subjects, could not but operate from afar; and cer¬ 
tainly in no heart did the love of country ever burn 
with a warmer glow than in that of Burns: ‘a tide of 
Scottish prejudice,’ as he modestly calls this deep and 
generous feeling, ‘had been poured along his veins; 
and he felt that it would boil there till the flood¬ 
gates shut in eternal rest.’ It seemed to him, as if 
he could do so little for his country, and yet would so 
gladly have done all. One small province stood open 
for him; that of Scottish Song, and how eagerly he 
entered on it; how devotedly he laboured there! In 
his toilsome journeyings, this object never quits him; 
it is the little happy valley 1 of his careworn heart. 
In the gloom of his own affliction, he eagerly searches 
after some lonely brother of the muse, and rejoices 
to snatch one other name from the oblivion that was 
covering it! These were early feelings, and they 
abode with him to the end: 

. . . A wish (I mind its power), 

A wish, that to my latest hour 
Will strongly heave my breast; 

That I, for poor auld Scotland’s sake, 

Some useful plan or book could make, 

Or sing a sang at least. 

The rough bur Thistle, spreading wide 
Amang the bearded bear, 


Tn Johnson’s tale of Rasselas i, the “Happy Valley” is 
the place where the princes of Abyssinia are kept in se¬ 
clusion from all the cares and troubles of the world. 



52 


Carlyle’s Essay on Burns 


I turn’d my weeding-clips aside, 

And spared the symbol dear. 1 

38. But to leave the mere literary character of 
Burns, which has already detained us too long. Far 
more interesting than any of his written works, as 1 
appears to us, are his acted ones: 2 the Life he willed, 
and was fated, to lead among his fellow men. These 
Poems are but like little rhymed fragments scattered 
here and there in the grand unrhymed Romance of 
his earthly existence; and it is only when intercalated 
in this at their proper places, that they attain their 
full measure of significance. And this too, alas, was 
but a fragment! The plan of a mighty edifice had 
been sketched; some columns, porticos, firm masses 
of building, stand completed; the rest more or less 
clearly indicated; with many a far-stretching tend¬ 
ency, which only studious and friendly eyes can now 
trace toward the purposed termination. For the 
work is broken off in the middle, almost in the begin¬ 
ning- and rises among us, beautiful and sad, at once 
unfinished and a ruin! If charitable judgment was 
necessary in estimating his Poems, and justice re¬ 
quired that the aim and the manifest power to fulfil 
it. must often be accepted for the fulfilment; much 
more is this the case in regard to his life, the sum 
and result of all his endeavours, where His difficulties 

'From “Epistle to the Guidwife of Wauchopc House.” 
Burns spared the thistle because it is the national em¬ 
blem of Scotland; the motto that goes along with it is, 
“Nemo me impune laces sit”: No one provokes (or chal¬ 
lenges) me without punishment. 

^Carlyle was always much interested in Biography, 
which he regularly spells with a capital. It is, however, 
sofnewhat, absurd to say that Burns's life is more inter¬ 
esting than his “written works,” for without the latter 
we should never have been interested in him at all. 



Carlyle's Essay on Burns 


53 


came upon him not in detail only, but in mass; and 
so much has been left unaccomplished, nay was mis¬ 
taken, and altogether marred. 

39. Properly speaking, there is but one era in the 
life of Burns, and that the earliest. We have not 
youth and manhood, but only youth: for, to the end, 
we discern no decisive change in the complexion of 
his character; in his thirty-seventh year, he is still, 
as it were, in youth. With all that resoluteness of 
judgment, that penetrating insight, and singular ma¬ 
turity of intellectual power, exhibited in his writings, 
he never attains to any clearness regarding himself; 
to the last, he never ascertains his peculiar aim, even 
with such distinctness as is common among ordinary 
men; and therefore never can pursue it with that 
singleness of will, which insures success and some 
contentment to such men. To the last, he wavers be¬ 
tween two purposes: glorying in his talbnt, like a true 
poet, he yet cannot consent to make this his chief 
and sole glory, and to follow it as the one thing need¬ 
ful, through poverty or riches, through good or evil 
report. Another far meaner ambition still cleaves 
to him; he must dream and struggle about a certain 
‘Rock of Independence;’ which, natural and even ad¬ 
mirable as it might be, was still but a warring with 
the world, on the comparatively insignificant ground 
of his being more completely or less completely sup¬ 
plied with money than others; of his standing at a 
higher, or at a lower altitude in general estimation, 
than others. For the world still appears to him, as 
to the young, in borrowed colours: he expects from 
it what it cannot give to any man; seeks for content¬ 
ment, not within himself, in action and wise effort, 
but from without, in the kindness of circumstances, 
in love, friendship, honour, pecuniary ease. He would 
be happy, not actively and in himself, but passively, 


54 


Carlyle's Essay on Burns 


and from some ideal cornucopia of Enjoyments, not 
earned by his own labour, but showered on him by 
the beneficence of Destiny. Thus, like a young man, 
he cannot gird himself up for any worthy well- 
calculated goal, but swerves to and fro, between pas¬ 
sionate hope and remorseful disappointments: rushing 
onwards with a deep tempestuous force, he surmounts 
or breaks asunder many a barrier; travels, nay ad¬ 
vances far, but advancing only under uncertain gui¬ 
dance, is ever and anon turned from his path; and to 
the last, cannot reach the only true happiness of a 
man, that of clear decided Activity in the sphere for 
which, by nature and circumstances, he has been fitted 
and appointed. 

40. We do not say these things in dispraise of 
Burns; nay, perhaps, they but interest us the more 
in his favour. This blessing 1 is not given soonest to 
the best; but rather, it is often the greatest minds 
that are latest in obtaining it; for where most is to 
be developed, most time may be required to develope 
it. A complex condition had been assigned him from 
without; as complex a condition from within: no 
‘pre-established harmony’ 2 existed between the clay 
soil of Mossgiel and the empyrean soul of Robert 
Burns; it was not wonderful that the adjustment be¬ 
tween them should have been long postponed, and his 
arm long cumbered, and his sight confused, in so vast 

^Refers to "the only true happiness of a man,” defined 
in the last sentence of the preceding paragraph. 

’Refers to, the theory of the relation between God and 
the soul expressed by Nicolas Malebranche (1638-1715). 
Carlyle means to imply that the heavenly soul of Burns 
found itself out of harmony with earth. As a matter of 
fact, Burns’s best poems are realistic, based firmly on the 
“clay soil of Mbssgiel.” 



Carlyle's Essay on Burns 


55 


and discordant an economy, 1 as he had been appointed 
steward over. Byron was, at his death, but a year 
younger than Burns; and through life, as it might 
have appeared, far more simply situated: yet in him 
too we can trace no such adjustment, no such moral 
manhood, but at best, and only a little before his end, 
the beginning of what seemed such. 

41. By much the most striking incident in Burns’s 
Life is his journey to Edinburgh; but perhaps a still 
more important one, is his residence at Irvine," so 
early as in his twenty-third year. Hitherto his life 
had been poor and toilworn; but otherwise not un- 
genial, and, with all its distresses, by no means un¬ 
happy. In his parentage, deducting outward circum¬ 
stances, he had every reason to reckon himself fortu¬ 
nate: 4 his father was a man of thoughtful, intense, 
j earnest character, as the best of our peasants are; 

S valuing knowledge, possessing some, and, what is far 
better and rarer, open-minded for more: a man with 
a keen insight and devout heart; reverent towards 
God, friendly therefore at once, and fearless towards 
all that God has made; in one word, though but a 
lard-handed peasant, a complete and fully unfolded 
|)l lan. Such a father is Seldom found in any rank in 
society; and was worth descending far in society to 
seek. Unfortunately, he was very poor; had he been 


Economy may mean “any practical system in which 
means are adjusted to ends.” Carlyle uses it here some¬ 
what curiously to refer to a system not practical, in which 
means and ends are not so adjusted. 

a In the rest of this paragraph Car’yle discusses the 
favorable conditions under which Burns lived before his 
“residence at Irvine.” He returns to the latter subject in 
the next paragraph. 

3 See the biographical sketch of Carlyle in the “Introduc¬ 
tion” for parallels between his family and that of Burns. 





56 


Carlyle's Essay on Burns 


even a little richer, almost never so little, the whole 
might have issued far otherwise. Mighty events turn 
on a straw; the crossing of a brook decides the con¬ 
quest of the world.' Had this William Burns's small 
seven acres of nursery-ground anywise prospered, the 
boy Robert had been sent to school; had struggled for¬ 
ward, as so many weaker men do, to some university; 
come forth not as a rustic wonder, but as a regular 
well-trained intellectual workman, and changed the 
whole course of British Literature,—for it lay in him 
to have done this ! * 2 But the nursery did not prosper; 
poverty sank his whole family below the help of even 
our cheap school-system: Burns remained a hard- 
worked ploughboy, and British literature took its own 
course. Nevertheless, even in this rugged scene, there 
is much to nourish him. If he drudges, it is with his 
brother, and for his father and mother, whom he loves, 
and would fain shield from want. Wisdom is not ban- 

: Caesar, by leading bis army across the little river Rubi¬ 
con in northern Italy, started the Civil War which re¬ 
sulted in the overthrow of Pompey and his own control 
of the Roman world. 

2 Probably this is a mistake. If Burns had received a 
university education, he might not have continued to write 
as a peasant in the Scottish dialect. His attempts at 
poems in literary English in the style of the day arouse 
no regret that he did not write more in that vein. Burns 
did not fail as a poet, but as a man ; as a poet he suc¬ 
ceeded admirably. As Andrew Lang, a great Scotch 
critic of recent days, says: ‘ One fai’s to see how any 

change of worldly circumstances could have bettered the 
true work of Burns.” Carlyle’s regret that Burns did not 
receive a university education is not shared by Lockhart, 
who questions whether Burns was improved by the read¬ 
ing and study that he did do and that led him mistakenly 
to imitate accepted literary models. (Lockhart’s Life, 
pp. 326, 327.) 



Carlyle's Essay on Burns 


57 


ished from this poor hearth, nor the halm of natural 
feeling: the solemn words, Let us worship God, are 
heard there from a 'priest-like father;’ 1 if threaten- 
ings of unjust men throw mother and children into 
tears, 2 these are tears not of grief only, but of holiest 
affection; every heart in that humble group feels it¬ 
self the closer knit to every other; in their hard war¬ 
fare they are there together, a 'little band of brethren.’ 
Neither are such tears, and the deep beautv that 
dwells in them, their only portion. Light visits the 
hearts as it does the eyes of all living: there is a 
force, too, in this youth, that enables him to trample 
on misfortune; nay, to bind it under his feet to make 
him sport. For a bold, warm, buoyant humour of 
character has been given him; and so the thick-coming 
shapes of evil are welcomed with a gay, friendly irony, 
and in their closest pressure he bates no jot of heart 
or hope. Vague yearnings of ambition fail not, as he 
grows up; dreamy fancies hang like cloud-cities 
around him; the curtain of Existence is slowly rising, 
in many-coloured splendour and gloom: and the auro¬ 
ral light of first love is gilding his horizon, and the 
music of song is on his path; and sr he walks 

... in glory and in joy, 

Behind his plough, upon the mountain side. 3 

Lockhart (p. 77) quotes from Gilbert Burns: “Robert 
had frequently remarked to me, that he thought there was 
something peculiarly venerable in the phrase, ‘Let us wor¬ 
ship God,’ used by a decent sober head of a family inro- 
ducing family worship. To this sentiment of the author the 
world is indebted for the Cotter's Saturday Nighty 2 

2 Burns wrote, “My indignation yet boils at the recollection 
of the scoundrel factor’s insolent letters, which used to set 
us all in tears.” (Lockhart, p. 19) Factor is the Scotch 
term for agent or steward. 

inaccurately quoted from Wordsworth’s “Leech-Gath¬ 
erer”: 



58 


Carlyle's Essay on Burns 


42. We ourselves know, from the best evidence, 
that up to this date Burns was happy; nay, that he 
was the gayest, brightest, most fantastic, fascinating 
being to be found in the world; more so even than he 
afterwards appeared. But now, at this early age, he 
quits the paternal roof; goes forth into looser, louder, 
more exciting society; and becomes initiated in those 
dissipations, 1 those vices which a certain class of 
philosophers have asserted to be a natural preparative 
for entering on active life; a kind of mud-bath, in 
which the youth is, as it were, necessitated to sleep, 
and, we suppose, cleanse himself, before the real toga 
of Manhood 2 can be laid on him. We shall not dispute 
much with this class of philosophers; we hope they 
are mistaken; for Sin and Remorse so easily beset us 
at all stages of life, and are always such indifferent 
company, that it seems hard we should, at any stage, 
be forced and fated not only to meet but to yield to 
them, and even serve for a term in their leprous arma¬ 
da. We hope it is not so. Clear we are, at all events, 
it cannot be the training one receives in this Devil’s 
service, but only our determining to desert from it, 
that fits us for true manly Action. We become men, 
not after we have been dissipated, and disappointed 
in the chase of false pleasure; but after we have as- 


“I thought of Chatterton, the marvellous Boy, 

The sleepless soul that perished in his pride; 

Of Him who walked in glory and in joy, 

Following his plough, along the mountain-side.” 

‘Burns wrote of his residence at Irvine: “Scenes of 
swaggering riot and roaring dissipation were till this time 
new to me. Here I learnt to fill my glass, and to mix 
without fear in a drunken squabble.” 

2 When a Roman free-born boy reached the age of maturi¬ 
ty, he went through a formal ceremony of admission to 
citizenship, a part of which consisted in clothing him with 
the “toga of Manhood” or toga virilis . 



Carlyle's Essay on Burns 


59 


certained, in any way, what impassable barriers hem 
us in through this life; how mad it is to hope for con¬ 
tentment to our infinite soul from the gifts of this 
extremely finite world; that a man must be sufficient 
for himself; and that for suffering and enduring there 
is no remedy but striving and doing. Manhood be¬ 
gins when we have in any way made truce with Nec¬ 
essity; begins even when we have surrendered to Nec¬ 
essity, as the most part only do; but begins joyfully 
and hopefully only when we have reconciled ourselves 
to Necessity; and thus, in reality, triumphed over it, 
and felt that in Necessity we are free. Surely, such 
lessons as this last, which, in one shape or other, is 
the grand lesson for every mortal man, are better 
learned from the lips of a devout mother, in the looks 
and actions of a devout father, while the heart is yet 
soft and pliant, than in collision with the sharp ada¬ 
mant of Fate, attracting us to shipwreck us, 1 when 
the heart is grown hard, and may be broken before 
it will become contrite. Had Burns continued to learn 
this, as he was already learning it, in his father’s 
cottage, he would have learned it fully, which he 
never did; and been saved many a lasting aberration, 
many a bitter hour and year of remorseful sorrow. 

43. It seems to us another circumstance of fatal 
import in Burns’s history, that at this time too he 
became involved in the religious quarrels of his dis¬ 
trict ; that he was enlisted and feasted, as the fighting 
man of the New-Light Priesthood, 2 in their highly 
unprofitable warfare. At the tables of these free- 
minded clergy, he learned much more than was need- 

J The reference is to the medieval belief that somewhere 
in the eastern seas was an island of adamant, which, act¬ 
ing as a magnet, drew to it and wrecked all ships within 
the reach of its attraction. 

’See note to paragraph 2. 



60 


Carlyle's Essay on Burns 


glory, but his first duty, and the true medicine for 
ened in his mind scruples about Religion itself; and 
a whole world of Doubts, which it required quite an¬ 
other set of conjurors than these men to exorcise. 1 
We do not say that such an intellect as his could 
have escaped similar doubts, at some period of his 
history; or even that he could, at a later period, have 
come through them altogether victorious and un¬ 
harmed: but it seems peculiarly unfortunate that 
this time, above all others, should have been fixed for 
the encounter. For now, with principles assailed by 
evil example from without, by 'passions raging like 
demons’ 2 from within, he had little need of skeptical 
misgivings to whisper treason in the heat of the bat¬ 
tle, or to cut off his retreat if he were already de¬ 
feated. He loses his feeling of innocence; his mind 
is at variance with itself; the old divinity no longer 
presides there; but wild Desires and wild Repentance 
alternately oppress him. Ere long, too, he has com¬ 
mitted himself before the world; his character for 
sobriety, dear to a Scottish peasant as few corrupted 
worldlings can even conceive, is destroyed in the eyes 
of men; and his only refuge consists in trying to dis¬ 
believe his guiltiness, and is but a refuge of lies. The 
blackest desperation now gathers over him, broken 
only by red lightnings of remorse. The whole fabric 


ir There is an implied comparison here between doubts 
and evil spirits, which priests among superstitious people 
are often called upon to exorcise , that is, to drive away by 
various religious rites. Persons who summoned or cast 
out evil spirits by magic rather than by religion were called 
conjurors. 

2 Bums said of himself: “My passions, once lighted up, 
raged like so many devils, till they found vent in rhyme; 
and then the conning over my verses, like a spell, soothed 
all into quiet.” (Lockhart, p. 36.) 





Carlyle's Essay on Burns 


61 


of his life is blasted asunder: for now not only his 
character, but his personal liberty, is to be lost: men 
and Fortune are leagued for his hurt; ‘hungry Ruin 
has him in the wind.’ He sees no escape but the 
saddest Of all: exile from his loved country, to a coun¬ 
try in every sense inhospitable and abhorrent to him. 
While the ‘gloomy night is gathering fast,’' in mental 
storm and solitude, as well as in physical, he sings 
his wild farewell to Scotland: 

Farewell my friends, farewell my foes! 

My peace with these, my love with those: 

The bursting tears my heart declare; 

Adieu, my native banks of Ayr! 

44. Light breaks suddenly in on him in floods; 
but still a false transitory light, and no real sunshine. 
He is invited to Edinburgh; hastens thither with an¬ 
ticipating heart; is welcomed as in a triumph, and 
with universal blandishment and acclamation; what¬ 
ever is wisest, whatever is greatest, or loveliest there, 
gathers round him, to gaze on his face, to show him 
honour, sympathy, affection. Burns’s appearance 
among the sages and nobles of Edinburgh, must be 
regarded as one of the most singular phenomena in 
modern Literature; almost like the appearance of 
some Napoleon among the crowned sovereigns of mod¬ 
ern Politics. For it is nowise as ‘a mockery king,” 
set there by favour, transiently, and for a purpose, 
that he will let himself be treated; still less is he a 
mad Rienzi, whose sudden elevation turns his too weak 

lr rhe first line of ‘‘The Author’s Farewell to his Native 
Country.” written in 1786, when Burns was about to set 
out for the West Indies. The four lines that follow are 
the conclusion of the same poem. The last line should be, 
‘‘Farewell, the bonnie banks of Ayr!” 

’Shakespeare, Richard IT, Act IV, Sc. 1, 257. 



62 


Carlyle's Essay on Burns 


head; 1 but he stands there on his own basis; cool, un¬ 
astonished, holding his equal rank from Nature her¬ 
self ; putting forth no claim which there is not 
strength in him, as well as about him, to vindicate. 
Mr. Lockhart has some forcible observations on this 
point: 

‘It needs no effort of imagination,’ says he, ‘to 
conceive what the sensations of an isolated set of 
scholars (almost all either clergymen or professors) 
must have been in the presence of this big-boned, 
black-browed, brawny stranger, with his great flash¬ 
ing eyes, who, having forced his way among them 
from the plough-tail, at a single stride, manifested 
in the whole strain of his bearing and conversation, 
a most thorough conviction that in the society of the 
most eminent men of his nation, he was exactly where 
he was entitled to be; hardly deigned to flatter them 
by exhibiting even an occasional symptom of being 
flattered by their notice; by turns calmly measured 
himself against the most cultivated understandings of 
his time in discussion; overpowered the bon mots 2 of 
the most celebrated convivialists by broad floods of 
merriment, impregnated with all the burning life of 
genius; astounded bosoms habitually enveloped in the 
thrice-piled folds of social reserve, by compelling them 
to tremble,—nay, to tremble visibly,—beneath the 
fearless touch of natural pathos; and all this without 
indicating the smallest willingness to be ranked among 

A Niccolo Rienzi (1313-54), a medieval Roman of low birth, 
who succeeded in establishing for a time a republic in 
Rome, of which he was head under the title of Tribune. 
His overthrow by the Roman nobles was partly due to his 
own rashness and arrogance. 

2 Most editors correct to the modern plural, which is the 
proper French form, bons mots; but all early editions of 
the Essay follow Lockhart in printing bon mots , which was 
in common use in the 18th century in England. This is a 
French phrase naturalized in English and means “clever 
sayings.” 



Carlyle's Essay on Burns 


63 


those professional ministers of excitement, who are 
content to be paid in money and smiles for doing 
what the spectators and auditors would be ashamed of 
doing in their own persons, even if they had the pow¬ 
er of doing it; and last, and probably worst of all, 
who was known to be in the habit of enlivening so¬ 
cieties which they would have scorned to approach, 
still more frequently than their own, with eloquence 
no less magnificent; with wit, in all likelihood still 
more daring; often enough, as the superiors whom he 
fronted without alarm might have guessed from the 
beginning, and had, ere long, no occasion to guess, 
with wit pointed at themselves.’ 

45. The farther we remove from this scene, the 
more singular will it seem to us: details of the ex¬ 
terior aspect of it are already full of interest. Most 
readers recollect Mr. Walker’s personal interview with 
Burns as among the best passages of his Narrative: 
a time will come when this reminiscence of Sir Wal¬ 
ter Scott’s, slight though it is, will also be precious. 

‘As for Burns,’ writes Sir Walter, 1 ‘I may truly say, 1 
Virgilium vidi tantum. I was a lad of fifteen in 
1786-7, when he came first to Edinburgh, but had 
sense and feeling enough to be much interested in his 
poetry, and would have given the world to know him: 
but I had very little acquaintance with any literary 
people, and still less with the gentry of the west coun¬ 
try, the two sets that he most frequented. Mr. Thomas 
Grierson was at that time a clerk of my father’s. He 
knew Burns, and promised to ask him to his lodgings 
to dinner, but had no opportunity to keep his word; 
otherwise I might have seen more of this distin¬ 
guished man. As it was, I saw him one day at the 
late venerable Professor Ferguson’s, where there were 
several gentlemen of literary reputation, among whom 

This is taken from Lockhart, pp. 117-120. 

2“Virgil I merely saw,” from Ovid, Tristia, IV, 10, 1.51. 
Ovid, the Roman poet, as a boy saw Virgil, his great prede¬ 
cessor, even as Scott saw Burns. 



64 


Carlyle's Essay on Burns 


I remember the celebrated Mr. Dugald Stewart. Of 
course, we youngsters sat silent, looked and listened. 
The only thing I remember which was remarkable in 
Burns’s manner, was the effect produced upon him by 
a print of Bunbury’s representing a soldier lying dead 
on the snow, his dog sitting in misery on one side,— 
on the other, his widow, with a child in her arms. 
These lines were written beneath: 

“Cold on Canadian hills, or Minden’s plain, 
Perhaps that mother wept her soldier slain; 

Bent o’er her babe, her eye dissolved in dew,— 
The big drops mingling with the milk he drew, 
Gave the sad presage of his future years, 

The child of misery, baptized in tears.” 1 

‘Burns seemed much affected by the print, or rath¬ 
er by the ideas which it suggested to his mind. He 
actually shed tears. He asked whose the lines were, 
and it chanced that nobody but myself remembered 
that they occur in a half-forgotten poem of Lang- 
horne’s, called by the unpromising title of “The Jus¬ 
tice of Peace.” I whispered my information to a 
friend present, he mentioned it to Burns, who re¬ 
warded me with a look and a word, which, though of 
mere civility, I then received and still recollect with 
very great pleasure. 

‘His person was strong and robust; his manners 
rustic, not clownish; a sort of dignified plainness 
and simplicity, which received part of its effect per¬ 
haps from one’s knowledge of his extraordinary tal¬ 
ents. His features are represented in Mr. Nasmyth’s 
picture; but to me it conveys the idea that they are 
diminished, as if seen in perspective. I think his 
countenance was more massive than it looks in 

'From John Langhorne’s Country Justice (1TT4-T) ; the 
reference is to the events of the year 1759. when English 
soldiers fought at Quebec and at Minden in Germany. 
Scott quoted the title of the poem a little inaccurately. 



Carlyle’s Essay on Burns 


65 


any of the protraits. I should have taken the poet, 
had I not known what he was, for a very sagacious 
country farmer of the old Scotch school, i. e. none of 
your modern agriculturists who keep labourers for 
their drudgery, but the douce gudeman who held his 
own plough. There was a strong expression of sense 
and shrewdness in all his lineaments; the eye alone, 
I think, indicated the poetical character and tempera¬ 
ment. It was large, and of a dark cast, which glowed 
(I say literally glowed ) when he spoke with feeling 
or interest. I never saw such another eye in a hu¬ 
man head, though I have seen the most distinguished 
men of my time. His conversation expressed perfect 
self-confidence, without the slightest presumption. 
Among the men who were the most learned of their 
time and country, he expressed himself with perfect 
firmness, but without the least intrusive forwardness; 
and when he differed in opinion, he did not hesitate to 
express it firmly, yet at the same time with modesty. 
I do not remember any part of his conversation dis¬ 
tinctly enough to be quoted; nor did I ever see him 
again, except in the street, where he did not rec¬ 
ognise me, as I could not expect he should. He was 
much caressed in Edinburgh: but (considering what 
literary emoluments have been since his day) the ef¬ 
forts made for his relief were extremely trifling. 

‘I remember, on this occasion I mention, I thought 
Burns’s acquaintance with English poetry was rather 
limited; and also, that having twenty times the ability 
of Allan Ramsey and of Fergusson,’ 1 he talked of them 
with too much humility as his models: there was 
doubtless national predilection in his estimate. 

‘This is all I can tell you about Burns. I have only 

J See “Introduction” for Burns’s acknowledgment of indebt¬ 
edness to these poets. Scott’s opinions expressed here are 
extraordinarily mature for a fifteen-year-old boy; he 
may have unconsciously read into his recollection some of 
his later thoughts. On the other hand, his own knowledge 
of English poetry was great even at this age. 



66 


Carlyle's Essay on Burns 


to add, that his dress corresponded with his manner. 
He was like a farmer dressed in his best to dine with 
the laird. I do not speak in malam partem , when I 
say, I never saw a man in company with his superiors 
in station or information more perfectly free from 
either the reality or the affectation of embarrassment. 
I was told, but did not observe it, that his address 
to females was extremely deferential, and always with 
a turn either to the pathetic or humorous, which en¬ 
gaged their attention particularly. I have heard the 
late Duchess of Gordon remark this.—I do not know 
anything I can add to these recollections of forty years 
since/ 

46. The conduct of Burns under this dazzling 
blaze of favour; the calm, unaffected, manly manner, 
in which he not only bore it, but estimated its value, 
has justly been regarded as the best proof that could 
be given of his real vigour and integrity of mind. 
A little natural vanity, some touches of hypocritical 
modesty, some glimmerings of affectation, at least some 
fear of being thought affected, we could have pardoned 
in almost any man; but no such indication is to be 
traced here. In his unexampled situation the young 
peasant is not a moment perplexed; so many strange 
lights do not confuse him, do not lead him astray. 
Nevertheless, we cannot but perceive that this winter 
did him great and lasting injury. A somewhat clear¬ 
er knowledge of men’s affairs, scarcely of their char¬ 
acters, it did afford him; but a sharper feeling of 
Fortune’s unequal arrangements in their social des¬ 
tiny it also left with him. 1 He had seen the gay and 

’Burns himself expressed this feeling in a letter to Mrs. 
Dunlop quoted by Lockhart (p. 217) ; “When I must stalk 
into a corner, lest the rattling equipage of some gaping 
blockhead should mangle me in the mire, I am tempted 
to exclaim—what merits had he had, or what demerits 
have I had that he is ushered into this state of being with 



Carlyle’s Essay on Burns 


67 


gorgeous arena, in which the powerful are born to 
play their parts; nay had himself stood in the midst 
of it; and he felt more bitterly than ever, that here 
he was but a looker-on, and had no part or lot in that 
splendid game. From this time a jealous indignant 
fear of social degradation takes possession of him; 
and perverts, so far as aught could pervert, his private 
contentment, and his feelings towards his richer fel¬ 
lows. It was clear to Burns that he had talent enough 
to make a fortune, or a hundred fortunes, could he 
but have rightly willed this; it was clear also that he 
willed something far different, and therefore could 
not make one. Unhappy it was that he had not power 
to choose the one, and reject the other; but must 
halt for ever between two opinions, two objects; mak¬ 
ing hampered advancement towards either. But so 
is it with many men: we ‘long for the merchandise, 
yet would fain keep the price;’ and so stand chaffer¬ 
ing with Fate, in vexatious altercation, till the night 
come, and our fair is over! 

47. The Edinburgh Learned of that period were 
in general more noted for clearness of head than for 
warmth of heart: with the exception of the good old 
Blacklock, 1 whose help was too ineffectual, scarcely 
one among them seems to have looked at Burns with 
any true sympathy, or indeed much otherwise than 
as at a highly curious thing. By the great also he is 
treated in the customary fashion; entertained at their 
tables and dismissed: certain modica of pudding and 
praise are, from time to time, gladly exchanged for 
the fascination of his presence; which exchange once 
effected, the bargain is finished, and each party goes 

the sceptre of rule in his puny fist, and I kicked into the 
world, the sport of folly, or the victim of pride?” 

*See “Introduction.” 



68 


Carlyle’s Essay on Burns 


his several way. At the end of this strange season, 
Burns gloomily sums up his gains and losses, and 
meditates on the chaotic future. In money he is some¬ 
what richer; in fame and the show of happiness, in¬ 
finitely richer; but in the substance of it, as poor as 
ever. Nay poorer; for his heart is now maddened 
still more with the fever of worldly Ambition; and 
through long years the disease will rack him with un¬ 
profitable sufferings, and weaken his strength for all 
true and nobler aims. 

48. What Burns was next to do or to avoid; how 
a man so circumstanced was now to guide himself 
towards his true advantage, might at this point of 
time have been a question for the wisest. It was a 
question, too, which apparently he was left altogether 
to answer for himself: of his learned or rich patrons 
it had not struck any individual to turn a thought on 
this so trivial matter. Without claiming for Burns 
the praise of perfect sagacity, we must say, that his 
Excise and Farm scheme does not seem to us a very 
unreasonable one; that we should be at a loss, even 
now, to suggest one decidedly better. Certain of his 
admirers have felt scandalized at his ever resolving 
to gauge;' and would have had him lie at the pool, 
till the spirit of Patronage stirred the waters, that 
so, with one friendly plunge, all his sorrows might be 
healed. * 2 Unwise counsellors! They know not the 
manner of this spirit; and how, in the lap of most 
golden dreams, a man might have happiness, were it 
not that in the interim he must die of hunger! It 

Probably aimed at Lockhart; see “Introduction.” 

2 The reference is to the story in John V, 2-9. of_the_pp.pl 
of Bethseda: “For an angel went down at a certain season 
into the pool, and troubled the water : whosoever then 
first after the troubling of the water stepped in, was made 
whole of whatsoever disease he had.” 





69 


Carlyle’s Essay on Burns 

reflects credit on the manliness and sound sense of 
Burns, that he felt so early on what ground he was 
standing; and preferred self-help, on the humblest 
scale, to dependence and inaction, though with hope of 
far more splendid possibilities. But even these possi¬ 
bilities were not rejected in this scheme: he might ex¬ 
pect, if it chanced that he had any friend, to rise, in 
no long period, into something even like opulence and 
leisure; while again, if it chanced that he had no 
friend, he could* still live in security; and for the 
rest, he ‘did not intend to borrow honour from any 
profession .’ 1 2 We think, then, that his plan was honest 
and well-calculated: all turned on the execution of it. 
Doubtless it failed; yet not, we believe, from any vice 
inherent in itself. Nay after all, it was no failure 
of external means, but of internal that overtook Burns. 
His was no bankruptcy of the purse, but of the soul; 
to his last day, he owed no man anything." 

1 Lockhart (p. 207) quotes as follows from Burns: 
“There is a certain stigma ... in the name of Exciseman; 
but I do not intend to borrow honour from any profession.” 

2 Lockhart (p. 2S1) quotes from Burns’s letter to Mr. Mac- 
murdo in December, 1793: “I have owed you money 
longer than ever I owed it to any man.—Here is Ker’s ac¬ 
count, and here are six guineas; and now, I don’t owe. a 
shilling to man, or woman either.” Lockhart writes (p. 
310) : “Burns was an honest man: after all his struggles, 
he owed no man a shilling when he died.” It would per¬ 
haps be more accurate to say that he left more than enough 
property to pay his small outstanding debts. Some of 
Burns’s biographers have misinterpreted two letters that 
he wrote shortly before his death, one to George Thomson 
and one to his cousin, James Burnes of Montrose, asking 
for a loan of ten pounds to pay a merchant who was 
threatening to sue him for the sum. These letters have 
been regarded as evidence of the poet’s extreme poverty, 
whereas he seems merely to have been at the time in need 



70 


Carlyle's Essay on Burns 


49. Meanwhile he begins well: with two good and 
wise actions. His donation to his mother, munificent 
from a man whose income had lately been seven 
pounds a-year, was worthy of him, and not more than 
worthy. Generous also, and worthy of him, was the 
treatment of the woman whose life’s welfare now de¬ 
pended on his pleasure. 1 A friendly observer might 
have hoped serene days for him: his mind is on the 
true road to peace with itself: what clearness he still 
wants will be given as he proceeds; 1'or the best teach¬ 
er of duties, that still lie dim to us, is the Practice of 
those we see, and have at hand. Had the ‘patrons of 
genius/ who could give him nothing, but taken nothing 
from him, at least nothing more! The wounds of his 
heart would have healed, vulgar ambition would have 
died away. Toil and Frugality would have been wel¬ 
come, since Virtue dwelt with them; and Poetry would 
have shone through them as of old; and in her clear 
ethereal light, which was his own by birthright, he 
might have looked down on his earthly destiny, and 
all its obstructions, not with patience only, but with 
love. 

50. But the patrons of genius would not have it 
so. Picturesque tourists, 2 all manner of fashionable 

of ready mon.ey, probably on account of the extra expenses 
of his illness. 

lr The reference is to his public acknowledgment of Jean 
Armour as his wife; the legal proof of the original mar¬ 
riage had been destroyed by her father. 

2 Carlyle himself inserts the following note here: “There 
is one little sketch by certain ‘English gentlemen’ of this 
class, which, though adopted in Currie’s Narrative, and 
since then repeated in most others, we have all along felt 
an invincible disposition to regard as imaginary: ‘On a 
rock that projected into the stream, they saw a man em¬ 
ployed in angling, of a singular appearance. He had a cap 
made of fox-skin on his head, a loose great-coat fixed 



Carlyle's Essay on Burns 


71 


danglers after literature, and, far worse, all manner 
of convivial Mecaenases, 1 hovered round him in his 
retreat; and his good as well as his weak qualities 
secured them influence over him. He was flattered 
by their notice; and his warm social nature made it 
impossible for him to shake them off, and hold on 
his way apart from them. These men, as we believe, 
were proximately the means of his ruin. Not that 
they meant him any ill; they only meant themselves 
a little good; if he suffered harm, let him look to 
it! But they wasted his precious time and his pre¬ 
cious talent; they disturbed his composure, broke 
down his returning habits of temperance and assidu¬ 
ous contented exertion. Their pampering was bane¬ 
ful to him; their cruelty, which soon followed, was 
equally baneful. The old grudge against Fortune’s 
inequality awoke with new bitterness in their neigh¬ 
bourhood, and Burns had no retreat but to ‘the Rock 
of Independence,’ which is but an air-castle, after all, 

round him by a belt, from which depended an enormous 
Highland broad-sword. It was Burns.’ Now, we rather 
think, it was not Burns. For, to say nothing of the fox- 
skin cap, the loose and quite Hibernian watch-coat with 
the belt, what are we to make of this ‘enormous Highland 
broad-sword’ depending from him? More especially, as 
there is no word of parish constables on the outlook to 
see whether, as Dennis phrases it, he had an eye to his 
own midriff or that of the public! Burns, of all men, had 
the least need, and the least tendency, to seek for distinc¬ 
tion, either in his own eyes, or those of others, by such 
poor mummeries.” 

*So spelled in all the early editions; the accepted spelling 
is Maecenas, the name of a noble Roman patron of letters, 
the friend of Augustus and of Horace and Virgil (73 
B. C.-8 A.D.). The plural is used here to refer to the 
shallow aristocrats who pretended to be his patrons, but 
only drank and caroused with him. 



72 Carlyle's Essay on Burns 

that looks well at a distance, but will screen no one 
from real wind and wet. Flushed with irregular ex¬ 
citement, exasperated alternately by contempt of 
others, and contempt of himself, Burns was no longer 
regaining his peace of mind, but fast losing it for 
ever. There was a hollowness at the heart of his life, 
for his conscience did not now approve what he was 
doing. 

51. Amid the vapours of unwise enjoyment, of boot¬ 
less remorse, and angry discontentment with Fate, 
his true loadstar, a life of Poetry, with Poverty, nay 
with Famine if it must be so, was too often altogether 
hidden from his eyes. And yet he sailed a sea, where 
without some such loadstar there was no right steer¬ 
ing. Meteors of French, Politics rise before him, but 
these were not his stars. An accident this, which 
hastened, but did not originate, his worst distresses. 
In the mad contentions of that time, he comes in col¬ 
lision with certain official Superiors; 1 is wounded by 
them; cruelly lacerated, we should say, could a doad 
mechanical implement, in any case, be called cruel; 
and shrinks, in indignant pain, into deeper self-seclu¬ 
sion, into gloomier moodiness than ever. His life has 
now lost its unity: it is a life of fragments; led with 
little aim, beyond the melancholy one of securing its 
own continuance,—in fits of wild false joy, when such 

Tiurns was democratic in his sympathies and was. there¬ 
fore, interested in the French Revolution, to which the 
aristocratic government of Great Britain was bitterly on- 
posed. His “collision” with his “official Superiors” was 
caused by his sending to the French Convention some guns 
seized in the course of his duties from a smuggling vessel. 
Lockhart (pp. 232-42) tells the story of Burns’s indiscreet 
conduct in this affair and his rebuke by the Excise Board. 
He contends that Burns was treated very leniently and 
suffered no penalty beyond a reprimand, which was not 
humiliating in its nature. 



Carlyle’s Essay on Burns 


73 


offered, and of black despondency when they passed 
away. His character before the world begins to suf¬ 
fer: calumny is busy with him; for a miserable man 
makes more enemies than friends. Some faults he 
has fallen into, and a thousand misfortunes; but deep 
criminality is what he stands accused of, and they 
that are not without sin cast the first stone at him! 1 
For is he not a well-wisher to the French Revolution, 
a Jacobin, 2 and therefore in that one act guilty of 
all? These accusations, political and moral, it has 
since appeared, were false enough: but the world 
hesitated little to credit them. Nay, his convivial 
Mecaenases themselves were not the last to do it. 
There is reason to believe that, in his later years, the 
Dumfries Aristocracy had partly withdrawn them¬ 
selves from Burns, as from a tainted person no longer 
worthy of their acquaintance. That painful class, 
stationed, in all provincial cities, behind the outmost 
breastwork of Gentility, there to stand siege and do 
battle against the intrusions of Grocerdom and Gra- 
zierdom, had actually seen dishonour in the society of 
Burns, and branded him with their veto; had, as we 
vulgarly say, cut him! We find one passage in this 
Work of Mr. Lockhart’s, which will not out of our 
thoughts: 

‘A gentleman of that country, whose name I have 
already more than once had occasion to refer to, has 

’See John VIII. 7, where Jesus said to the accusers of a 
certain woman. ‘‘He that is without sin among you, let him 
first cast a stone at her.’’ 

2 Originally a member of a French* revolutionary c T ub 
which organized the Reign of Terror. The name was ap¬ 
plied to any sympathizer with the French Revolution, and 
has been since used of any revolutionist or political radi¬ 
cal. Be careful not to confuse with Jacobite (see note 
to paragraph 36). Carlyle is, of course,..ironical in this- 
sentence. 



74 


Carlyle's Essay on Burns 


often told me that he was seldom more grieved, than 
when riding into Dumfries one fine summer evening 
about this time to attend a county ball, he saw Burns 
walking alone, on the shady side of the principal 
street of the town, while the opposite side was gay 
with successive groups of gentlemen and ladies, all 
drawn together for the festivities of the night, not 
one of whom appeared willing to recognize him. The 
horseman dismounted, and joined Burns, who on his 
proposing to cross the street said: “Nay, nay, my 
young friend, that’s all over now;” and quoted, after 
a pause, some verses of Lady Grizzel Baillie’s pathetic 
ballad: 

“His bonnet stood ance fu’ fair on his brow, 

His auld ane look’d better than mony ane’s new; 
But now he lets ’t wear ony way it will hing, 

And casts himself dowie upon the corn-bing. 

0 were we young, as we ance hae been, 1 
We sud hae been galloping down on yon green, 

And linking it ower the lily-white lea! 

And werena my heart light I wad die.” 

It was little in Burns’s character to let his feelings on 
certain subjects escape in this fashion. He, imme¬ 
diately after reciting these verses, assumed the 
sprightliness of his most pleasing manner; and taking 
his young friend home with him, entertained him very 
agreeably till the hour of the ball arrived.’ 

52. Alas! when we think that Burns now sleeps 
‘where bitter indignation can no longer lacerate his 
heart,’ 2 and that most of those fair dames and friz¬ 
zled gentlemen already lie at his side, where the 


'Pronounce been to rhyme with green and die to rhyme 
with lea. 

^Carlyle’s note: Ufri saeva indignatio cor utterius lace- 
rare nequit. —Swift’s epitaph. 



Carlyle's Essay on Burns 


75 


breastwork of gentility is quite thrown down,—who 
would not sigh over the thin delusions and foolish 
toys that divide heart from heart, and make man 
unmerciful to his brother! 

53. It was not now to be hoped that the genius of 
Burns would ever reach maturity, or accomplish 
aught worthy of itself. His spirit was jarred in its 
melody; not the soft breath of natural feeling, but 
the rude hand of Fate, was now sweeping over the 
strings. And yet what harmony was in him, what 
music even in his discords! How the wild tones had 
a charm for the simplest and the wisest; and all men 
felt and knew that here also was one of the Gifted! 
‘If he entered an inn at midnight, after all the ih- 
mates were in bed, the news of his arrival circulated 
from the cellar to the garret; and ere ten minutes 
had elapsed, the landlord and all his guests were as¬ 
sembled! 1 Some brief pure moments of poetic life 
were yet appointed him, in the composition of his 
Songs. We can understand how he grasped at this 
employment; and how, too, he spurned all other re¬ 
ward for it but what the labour itself brought him.* 
For the soul of Burns, though scathed and marred, 
was yet living in its full moral strength, though 
sharply conscious of its errors and abasement: and 
here, in his destitution and degradation, was one act 


Lockhart, pp. 207, 208. 

2 Lockhart (p. 282) quotes Burns’s letter to George Thom¬ 
son, for whose Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs 
Burns furnished a number of songs: “As to any remunera¬ 
tion, you may think my songs either above or below price; 
for they shall absolutely he the one or the other. In the 
honest enthusiasm with which I embark in your undertak¬ 
ing, to talk of money, wages, fee, hire, etc., would be down¬ 
right prostitution.” 



76 


Carlyle’s Essay on Burns 


of seeming nobleness and self-devotedness left even 
for him to perform. He felt, too, that with all the 
‘thoughtless follies’ that had ‘laid him low,’ the world 
was unjust and cruel to him; and he silently appealed 
to another and calmer time. Not as a hired soldier, 
but as a patriot, would he strive for the glory of his 
country: so he cast from him the poor sixpence a-day, 
and served zealously as a volunteer. Let us not 
grudge him this last luxury of his existence; let him 
not have appealed to us in vain! The money was 
not necessary to him; he struggled through without 
it: long since, these guineas would have been gone, 
and now the high-mindedness of refusing them will 
plead for him in all hearts for ever. 

54. We are here arrived at the crisis of Burns’s 
life; for matters had now taken such a shape with 
him as could not long continue. If improvement was 
not to be looked for, Nature could only for a limited 
time maintain this dark and maddening warfare 
against the world and itself. We are not medically 
informed whether any continuance of years was, at 
this period, probable for Burns; whether his death 
is to be looked on as in some sense an accidental 
event, or only as the natural consequence of the long 
series of events that had preceded. The latter seems 
to be the likelier opinion; and yet it is by no means 
a certain one. At all events, as we have said, some 
change could not be very distant. Three gates of de¬ 
liverance, it seems to us, were open for Burns: clear 
poetical activity; madness; or death. The first, with 
longer life, was still possible, though not probable; 
for physical causes were beginning to be concerned 
in it: and yet Burns had an iron resolution: could 
he but have seen and felt, that not only his highest 

'From Burns’s poem on himself, caked “A Bard's Epi¬ 
taph.” 



Carlyle’s Essay on Burns 


77 


glory, but his first duty, and the true medicine for 
all his woes, lay here. The second was still less proba¬ 
ble; for his mind was ever among the clearest and 
firmest. So the milder third gate was opened for 
him: and he passed, not softly, yet speedily, into that 
still country, where the hail-storms and fire-showers 
do not reach, and the heaviest-laden wayfarer at 
length lays down his load! 

55. Contemplating this sad end of Burns, and how 
he sank unaided by any real help, uncheered by any 
wise sympathy, generous minds have sometimes fig¬ 
ured to themselves, with a reproachful sorrow, that 
much might have been done for him; that by counsel, 
true affection, and friendly ministrations, he might 
have been saved to himself and the world. We ques¬ 
tion whether there is not more tenderness of heart 
than soundness of judgment in these suggestions. It 
seems dubious to us whether the richest, wisest, most 
benevolent individual could have lent Burns any ef¬ 
fectual help. Counsel, which seldom profits any one, 
he did not need; in his understanding, he knew the 
right from the wrong, as well perhaps as any man 
ever did; but the persuasion, which would have availed 
him, lies not so much in the head as in the heart, 
where no argument or expostulation could have as¬ 
sisted much to implant it. As to money again, we do 
not believe that this was his essential want; or well 
see how any private man could, even presupposing 
Burns’s consent, have bestowed on him an independent 
fortune, with much prospect of decisive advantage. 
It is a mortifying truth, that two men in any rank of 
society could hardly be found virtuous enough to give 
money, and to take it as a necessary gift, without in¬ 
jury to the moral entireness of one or both. But so 
stands the fact: Friendship, in the old heroic sense 
of that term, no longer exists; except in the cases of 


78 


Carlyle's Essay on Burns 


kindred or other legal affinity, it is in reality no longer 
expected, or recognised as a virtue among men. A 
close observer of manners has pronounced ‘Patron¬ 
age,’ that is, pecuniary or other economic furtherance, 
to be ‘twice cursed;’ cursing him that gives, and him 
that takes! 1 And thus, in regard to outward matters 
also it has become the rule, as in regard to inward 
it always was and must be the rule, that no one shall 
look for effectual help to another; but that each shall 
rest contented with what help he can afford himself. 
Such, we say, is the principle of modern Honour; nat¬ 
urally enough growing out of that sentiment of Pride, 
which we inculcate and encourage as the basis of our 
whole social morality. Many a poet has been poorer 
than Burns; but no one was ever prouder: we may 
question whether, without great precautions, even a 
pension from Royalty would not have galled and en¬ 
cumbered, more than actually assisted him. 

56. Still less, therefore, are we disposed to join 
with another class of Burns’s admirers, who accuse 
the higher ranks among us of having ruined Burns 
by their selfish neglect of him. 2 We have already 
stated our doubts whether direct pecuniary help, had 


1 There is a reference here to the famous lines from the 
Merchant of Venice (Act IV, Sc. I, 190-93) : 

“The quality of mercy is not strained, 

It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven 
Upon the place beneath: it is twice blest; 

It blesseth him that gives, and him that takes.” 

2 Carlyle probably has in mind several passages in Lock¬ 
hart’s Life, of which the following is representative: “The 
great poet himself, whose name is enough to ennoble his 
children’s children, was, to the eternal disgrace of his 
country, suffered to live and die in penury, and as far as 
such a creature could be degraded by any external circum¬ 
stance, in degradation.” (p. 306). 





Carlyle's Essay on Burns 


79 


it been offered, would have been accepted, or could 
have proved very effectual. We shall readily admit, 
however, that much was to be done for Burns; that 
many a poisoned arrow might have been warded from 
his bosom; many an entanglement in his path cut 
asunder by the hand of the powerful; and light and 
heat, shed on him from high places, would have made 
his humble atmosphere more genial; and the softest 
heart then breathing might have lived and died with 
some fewer pangs. Nay, we shall grant farther, and 
for Burns it is granting much, that, with all his 
pride, he would have thanked, even with exaggerated 
gratitude, any one who had cordially befriended him: 
patronage, unless once cursed, needed not to have 
been twice so. At all events, the poor promotion he 
desired in his calling might have been granted: it 
was his own scheme, therefore likelier than any other 
to be of service. All this it might have been a luxury, 
nay it was a duty, for our nobility to have done. 
No part of all this, however, did any of them do; or 
apparently attempt, or wish to do: so much is granted 
against them. But what then is the amount of their 
blame? Simply that they were men of the world, and 
walked by the principles of such men; that they 
treated Burns, as other nobles and other commoners 
had done other poets; as the English did Shaks- 
peare; as King Charles and his Cavaliers did Butler, 
as King Philip and his Grandees did Cervantes. 1 Do 
men gather grapes of thorns, or shall we cut down 


^Charles II neglected to reward Samuel Butler for his 
services to the Royalist cause. Cervantes (1547-1616), the 
author of the great Spanish romance of Don Quixote, was 
similarly neglected by Philip II and Philip III of Spain. 
Shakspeare/s genius was hardly rewarded as it deserved, 
but he was not neglected or ill-used in any way. 



80 


Carlyle’s Essay on Burns 


our thorns for yielding only a fence , and haws? How, 
indeed, could the ‘nobility and gentry of his native 
land’ hold out any help to this ‘Scottish Bard, proud 
of his name and country?’ Were the nobility and gen¬ 
try so much as able rightly to help themselves? Had 
they not their game to preserve; their borough inter¬ 
ests to strengthen; 1 dinners, therefore, of various 
kinds to eat and give? Were their means more than 
adequate to all this business, or less than adequate? 
Less than adequate, in general: few of them in reality 
were richer than Burns; many of them were poorer, 
for sometimes they had to wring their supplies, as 
with thumbscrews, 2 from the hard hand; and, in their 
need of guineas, to forget their duty of mercy ; which 
Burns was never reduced to do. Let us pity and 
forgive them. The game they preserved and shot, 
the dinners they ate and gave, the borough interests 
they strengthened, the little Babylons they severally 
builded by the glory of their might, 3 are all melted, 
or melting back into the primeval Chaos, as man’s 

lr riie landed aristocracy of England and Scotland are 
much interested in protecting and hunting game-birds and 
animals on their large estates. They also take an impor¬ 
tant share in politics, frequently representing their bor¬ 
oughs in Parliament or endeavoring to secure the election 
of members who will carry out policies favorable to their 
class. Building up political support for themselves in their 
own locality is called strengthening their borough interests. 

^Medieval instruments of torture. The idea is that in 
difficult times, the landlord could obtain rent from his ten¬ 
ants only by the most severe measures. 

3 Daniel IV, 30 : ‘‘The king spoke and said, Is not this 
great Babylon, that I have built for the house of the king¬ 
dom, by the might of my power, and for the honor of my 
majesty?” This great Babylon is as completely dead as 
the little Babylons here referred to. 



Carlyle's Essay on Burns 


81 


merely selfish endeavours are fated to do: and here 
was an action, extending in virtue of its worldly in¬ 
fluence, we may say, through all time; in virtue of 
its moral nature, beyond all time, being immortal as 
the Spirit of Goodness itself; this action was offered 
them to do, and light was not given them to do it. 
Let us pity and forgive them. But better than pity, 
let us go and do otherwise. Human suffering did not 
end with the life of Burns; neither was the solemn 
mandate, ‘Love one another, bear one another’s bur¬ 
dens,’ 1 given to the rich only, but to all men. True, 
we shall find no Burns to relieve, to assuage by our 
aid or our pity; but celestial natures, groaning under 
the fardels of a weary life, 2 we shall still find; and 
that wretchedness which Fate has rendered voiceless 
and tuneless , is not the least wretched, but the most. 

57. Still we do think that the blame of Burns’s 
failure lies chiefly with the world. The world, it 
seems to us, treated him with more, rather than with 
less kindness, than it usually shows to such men. It 
has ever, we fear, shown but small favour to its 
Teachers: hunger and nakedness, perils and revilings, 
the prison, the cross, the poison-chalice, have, in most 
times and countries, been the market-price it has of¬ 
fered for Wisdom, the welcome with which it has 
greeted those who have come to enlighten and purify 
it. Homer 3 and Socrates, and the Christian Apostles. 

ir These are really two mandates, for they do not occur 
together in the Bible. The first is found nine times in the 
New Testament: the second in Galatians VI, 2. 

2 Hamlet, Act III, Sc. I, 76, 77 (from Hamlet’s famous 
soliloquy) : 

. . . “who would fardels bear, 

To grunt and sweat under a weary life?” 

Tt is difficult to see why Homer should be included among 
the Martyrs, though tradition has it that he was poor as 

well as blind. 



82 


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belong to old days; but the world’s Martyrology was 
not completed with these. Roger Bacon and Galileo 
languish in priestly dungeons; Tasso pines in the cell 
of a madhouse; Camoens dies begging on the streets 
of Lisbon. So neglected, so ‘persecuted they the 
Prophets/ 1 not in Judea only, but in all places where 
men have been. We reckon that every poet of Burns’s 
order is, or should be, a prophet and teacher to his 
age; that he has no right to expect great kindness 
from it, but rather is bound to do it great kindness; 
that Burns, in particular, experienced fully the usual 
proportion of the world’s goodness; and that the blame 
of his failure, as we have said, lies not chiefly with 
the world. 

58. Where then does it lie? We are forced to 
answer: With himself; it is his inward, not his out¬ 
ward misfortunes, that bring him to the dust. Seldom, 
indeed, is it otherwise; seldom is a life morally 
wrecked but the grand cause lies in some in¬ 
ternal mal-arrangement, some want less of good 
fortune than of good guidance. Nature fashions 
no creature without implanting in it the strength 
needful for its action and duration; least of all does 
she so neglect her masterpiece and darling, the poetic 
soul. Neither can we believe that it is in the power of 
any external circumstances utterly to ruin the mind 
of a man; nay, if proper wisdom be given him, even 
so much as to affect its essential health and beauty. 
The sternest sum-total of all worldly misfortunes is 
Death; nothing more can lie in the cup of human 
woe: yet many men, in all ages, have triumphed over 
Death, and led it captive; converting its physical vic¬ 
tory into a moral victory for themselves, into a seal 
and immortal consecration for all that their past life 
had achieved. What has been done, may be done 

• 

1 Matthew V, 12. 





Carlyle's Essay on Burns 


83 


again: nay, it is but the degree and not the kind of 
such heroism that differs in different seasons; for 
without some portion of this spirit, not of boisterous 
daring, but of silent fearlessness, of Self-denial in 
all its forms, no good man, in any scene or time, has 
ever attained to be good. 

59. We have already stated the error of Burns; 
and mourned over it, rather than blamed it. It was 
the want of unity in his purposes, of consistency in 
his aims; the hapless attempt to mingle in friendly 
union the common spirit of the world with the spirit 
of poetry, which is of a far different and altogether 
irreconcilable nature. Burns was nothing wholly; 
and Burns could be nothing, no man formed as he 
was can be anything, by halves. The heart, not of a 
mere hot-blooded, popular Versemonger, or poetical 
Restaurateur / but of a true Poet and Singer, worthy 
of the old religious heroic times, had been given him: 
and he fell in an age, not of heroism and religion, but 
of scepticism, selfishness, and triviality, when true 
Nobleness was little understood, and its place sup¬ 
plied by a hollow, dissocial, altogether barren and 
unfruitful principle of Pride. The influences of that 
age, his open, kind, susceptible, nature, to say nothing 
of his highly untoward situation, made it more than 
usually difficult for him to cast aside, or rightly sub¬ 
ordinate; the better spirit that was within him ever 
sternly demanded its rights, its supremacy: he spent 
his life in endeavouring to reconcile these two; and 
lost it, as he must lose it, without reconciling them. 

60. Burns was born poor; and born also to con¬ 
tinue poor, for he would not endeavour to be other¬ 
wise: this it had been well could he have once for all 


J One who keeps a restaurant. Carlyle speaks with con¬ 
tempt here of the so-called poet whose motive for writing 
is only to please the taste of the public. 



84 


Carlyle’s Essay on Burns 


admitted, and considered as finally settled. He was 
poor, truly; but hundreds even of his own class and 
order of minds have been poorer, yet have suffered 
nothing deadly from it: nay, his own Father had a 
far sorer battle with ungrateful destiny than his was; 
and he did not yield to it, but died courageously war¬ 
ring, and to all moral intents prevailing, against it. 
True, Burns had little means, had even little time for 
poetry, his only real pursuit and vocation; but so 
much the more precious was what little he had. In 
all these external respects his case was hard; but very 
far from the hardest. Poverty, incessant drudgery, 
and much worse evils, it has often been the lot of 
Poets and wise men to strive with, and their glory to 
conquer. Locke was banished as a traitor; and wrote 
his Essay on the Human Understanding, sheltering 
himself in a Dutch garret. 1 Was Milton rich or at 
his ease, when he composed Paradise Lost ? Not only 
low, but fallen from a height; not only poor but im¬ 
poverished; in darkness and with dangers compassed 
round, he sang his immortal song, and found fit au¬ 
dience, though few. 2 Did not Cervantes finish his 
work, a maimed soldier, and in prison? 3 * * * * 8 Nay, was 


1 John Locke (1632-1704), an English philosopher, wrote 
his great book, named in the text, while in exile in Hol¬ 
land (1682-88) on account of his supposed connection with 
plots against the governments of Charles II and James II. 

2 Milton composed Paradise Lost after the Restoration of 
the Stuart kings in 1660. He had been a leading supporter 
of Cromwell’s government, and, especially because of his 

defense of Charles I’s execution, he was for a time in ac¬ 

tual danger under the new rule. He was also blind. The 

phrases, “in darkness and with dangers compassed round,” 

and “lit audience, though few,” are quoted from Paradise 

Lost , Book VII, lines 28 and 31. 

8 This is an error; Cervantes did not write Don Quixote 
in prison. 






Carlyle's Essay on Burns 


85 


not the Araucana, which Spain acknowledges as its 
Epic, written without even the aid of paper; on scraps 
of leather, as the stout fighter and voyager snatched 
any moment from that wild warfare? 1 

61. And what then had these men, which Burns 
wanted? Two things; both which, it seems to us, 
are indispensable for such men. They had a true, 
religious principle of morals; and a single not a 
double aim in their activity. They were not self- 
seekers and self-worshippers; but seekers and wor¬ 
shippers of something far better than Self. Not 
personal enjoyment was their object; but a high, 
heroic idea of Religion, of Patriotism, of heavenly 
Wisdom in one or the other form, ever hovered be¬ 
fore them; in which cause, they neither shrank from 
suffering, nor called on the earth to witness it as 
something wonderful; but patiently endured, count¬ 
ing it blessedness enough so to spend and be spent. 
Thus the ‘golden-calf of Self-love,’ however curiously 
carved, was not their Deity; but the Invisible Good- 
✓ness, which alone is man’s reasonable service. 2 This 
feeling was as a celestial fountain, whose streams 
refreshed into gladness and beauty all the provinces 
of their otherwise too desolate existence. In a word, 
they willed one thing, to which all other things were 
subordinated, and made subservient; and therefore 
they accomplished it. The wedge will rend rocks; 

x The Araucana , an epic poem about a campaign against 
the Araucanos of Peru, records the personal experiences of 
its author, Alonzo de Ercilla y Zuniga (1533-95). 

2 The last phrase is a quotation from Romans XII, 1. 
The first part of the sentence is a reference to the story 
of the worship by the Israelites of the golden calf instead 
of the true God (Exodus XXXII). The golden calf stands 
here for any false standard of life. 



86 


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but its edge must be sharp and single: if it be double, 
the wedge is bruised in pieces, and will rend nothing. 

62. Part of this superiority these men owed to 
their age; in which heroism and devotedness were 
still practised, or at least not yet disbelieved in: but 
much of it likewise they owed to themselves. With 
Burns, again it was different. His morality, in most 
of its practical points, is that of a mere worldly man; 
enjoyment, in a finer or coarser shape, is the only 
thing he longs and strives for. A noble instinct some¬ 
times raises him above this; but an instinct only, and 
acting only for moments. He has no Religion; in the 
shallow age, where his days were cast, 1 Religion was 
not discriminated from the New and Old Light forms 
of Religion; and was, with these, becoming obsolete 
in the minds of men. His heart, indeed, is alive with 
a trembling adoration, but there is no temple in his 
understanding. He lives in darkness and in the shad¬ 
ow of doubt. His religion, at best, is an anxious wish; 
like that of Rabelais, ‘a great Perhaps/ 

63. He loved Poetry warmly, and in his heart ;v 
could he but have loved it purely, and with his whole 
undivided heart, it had been well. For Poetry, as 
Burns could have followed it, is but another form of 
Wisdom, of Religion; is itself Wisdom and Religion. 
But this also was denied him. His poetry is a stray 
vagrant gleam, which will not be extinguished within 
him, yet rises not to be the true light of his path, 
but is often a wildfire that misleads him. It was 
not necessary for Burns to be rich, to be, or to seem 
‘independent:’ but it was necessary for him to be at 
one with his own heart; to place what was highest 
in his nature, highest also in his life; ‘to seek within 
himself for that consistency and sequence, which ex- 

Carlyle, as usual, over-states the case against the 
eighteenth century. 




Carlyle's Essay on Burns 


87 


ternal events would for ever refuse him/ He was 
born a poet; poetry was the celestial element of his 
being, and should have been the soul of his whole en¬ 
deavours. Lifted into that serene aether, whither 
he had wings given him to mount, he would have 
needed no other elevation: poverty, neglect, and all 
evil, save the desecration of himself and his Art, were 
a small matter to him; the pride and the passions of 
the world lay far beneath his feet; and he looked 
down alike on noble and slave, on prince and beggar, 
and all that wore the stamp of man, with clear rec¬ 
ognition, with brotherly affection, with sympathy, 
with pity. Nay, we question whether for his culture 
as a Poet, poverty, and much suffering for a season, 
were not absolutely advantageous. Great men, in 
looking back over their lives, have testified to that 
effect. ‘I would not for much/ says Jean Paul/ that 
I had been born richer/ And yet Paul’s birth was 
poor enough; for, in another place, he adds: ‘The 
prisoner’s allowance is bread and water; and I had 
often only the latter.’ But the gold that is refined 
in the hottest furnace comes out the purest; or, as 
he has himself expressed it, ‘the canary-bird sings 
sweeter the longer it has been trained in a darkened 
cage.’ 

64. A man like Burns might have divided his 
hours between poetry and virtuous industry; indus¬ 
try which all true feeling sanctions, nay prescribes, 
and which has a beauty, for that cause, beyond the 
pomp of thrones: but to divide his hours between 
poetry and rich men’s banquets, was an ill-starred 
and inauspicious attempt. How could he be at ease 
at such banquets? What had he to do there, mingling 

^ean Paul Richter, commonly called Jean Paul, . Ger¬ 
man poet and philosopher (1763-1825), whose influence on 
Carlyle was very great. 



88 


Carlyle's Essay on Burns 


his music with the coarse roar of altogether earthly 
voices; brightening the thick smoke of intoxication 
with fire lent him from heaven? Was it his aim to 
enjoy life? To-morrow he must go drudge as an Ex¬ 
ciseman! We wonder not that Burns became moody, 
indignant, and at times an offender against certain 
rules of society; but rather that he did not grow ut¬ 
terly frantic, and run amuck against them all. How 
could a man, so falsely placed, by his own or others’ 
fault, ever know contentment or peaceable diligence 
for an hour? What he did, under such perverse 
guidance, and what he forbore to do, alike fill us with 
astonishment at the natural strength and worth of 
his character. 

65. Doubtless there was a remedy for this per¬ 
verseness: but not in others; only in himself; least 
of all in simple increase of wealth and worldly ‘re¬ 
spectability.’ We hope we have now heard enough 
about the efficacy of wealth for poetry, and to make 
poets happy. Nay, have we not seen another in¬ 
stance of it in these very days? Byron, a man of an 
endowment considerably less ethereal than that of 
Burns, is born in the rank not of a Scottish plough¬ 
man, but of an English peer: the highest worldly hon¬ 
ours, the fairest worldly career, are his by inherit¬ 
ance; the richest harvest of fame he soon reaps, in 
another province, by his own hand. And what does 
all this avail him? Is he happy, is he good, is he 
true? Alas, he has a poet’s soul, and strives towards 
the Infinite and the Eternal; and soon feels that all 
this is but mounting to the house-top to reach the 
stars! Like Burns, he is only a proud man; might 
like him have ‘purchased a pocket-copy of Milton to 
study the character of Satan;’ 4 for Satan also is By- 

1 Lockhart (p. 155) quotes from one of Burns’s letters, 
written just after his return from Edinburgh: “I never, my 




Carlyle's Essay on Burns 


89 


ron’s grand exemplar, the hero of his poetry, and the 
model apparently of his conduct . 1 As in Burns’s case 
too, the celestial element will not mingle with the clay 
of earth; both poet and man of the world he must not 
be; vulgar Ambition will not live kindly with poetic 
Adoration; he cannot serve God and Mammon . 2 Byron, 
like Burns, is not happy; nay, he is the most wretched 
of all men. His life is falsely arranged: the fire that 
is in him is not a strong, still, central fire, warming 
into beauty the products of a world; but it is the maa 
fire of a volcano; and now,—we look sadly into the 
ashes of a crater, which erelong will fill itself with 
snow ! 3 


friend, thought mankind capable of any thing very gener¬ 
ous ; but the stateliness of the patricians of Edinburgh, and 
the servility of my plebeian brethren, (who, perhaps, for¬ 
merly eyed me askance), since I returned home, have put 
me out of conceit altogether with my species. I have 
bought a pocket-Milton, which I carry perpetually about 
me, in order to study the sentiments, the dauntless mag- 
manimity, the intrepid unyielding independence, the desper¬ 
ate daring, and noble defiance of hardship, in that great 
personage—Satan.” 

"The qualities enumerated by Burns as belonging to 
Milton’s Satan seemed admirable to Byron as well. In ad¬ 
dition, however, the latter thought himself like Satan in 
being an outcast from society and a rebel against it. 

2 Matthew VI, 24. The meaning is that one cannot serve 
God and at the same time devote one’s life to a struggle 
for worldly prosperity. 

3 Carlyle means that Byron’s genius, his intellectual fer¬ 
vor, consumed and destroyed him and became a destructive 
force instead of serving the world, because his life was not 
properly controlled by high principles. The snow in the 
crater probably refers to what Carlyle thought would be 
Ryron/’s short-lived fame. He under-estimated the enduring 
qualities of Byron’s poetry. 



90 


Carlyle’s Essay on Burns 


66. Byron and Burns were sent forth as mission¬ 
aries to their generation, to teach it a higher Doc¬ 
trine, a purer Truth: they had a message to deliver, 
which left them no rest till it was accomplished; in 
dim throes of pain, this divine behest lay smoulder¬ 
ing within them; for they knew not what it meant, 
and felt it only in mysterious anticipation, and they 
had to die without articulately uttering it. They are 
in the camp of the Unconverted; yet not as high mes¬ 
sengers of rigorous though benignant truth, but as 
soft flattering singers, and in pleasant fellowship, 
will they live there: they are first adulated, then per¬ 
secuted; they accomplish little for others; they find 
no peace for themselves, but only death and the peace 
of the grave. We confess, it is not without a certain 
mournful awe that we view the fate of these noble 
souls, so richly gifted, yet ruined to so little purpose 
with all their gifts. It seems to us there is a stern 
moral taught in this piece of history ,—twice told us 
in our own time! Surely to men of like genius, if 
there be any such, it carries with it a lesson of deep 
impressive significance. Surely it would become such 
a man, furnished for the highest of all enterprises, 
that of being the Poet of his Age, to consider well 
what it is that he attempts, and in what spirit he at¬ 
tempts it. For the words of Milton are true in all 
times, and were never truer than in this:: ‘He, who 
would write heroic poems, must make his whole life 
a heroic poem.’ 1 If he cannot first so make his life, 
then let him hasten from this arena; for neither its 
lofty glories, nor its fearful perils, are for him. Let 
him dwindle into a modish balladmonger; let him 

J What Milton actually wrote was, “He wiio would not be 
frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable 
things ought himself to be a true poem/’ (An Apology for 
Smectymnuus, 1642) 



Carlyle's Essay on Burns 


91 


worship and besing the idols of the time, and the 
time will not fail to reward him. If, indeed, he can 
endure to live in that capacity! Byron and Burns 
could not live as idol-priests, but the fire of their 
own hearts consumed them; and better it was for 
them that they could not. For it is not in the favour 
of the great or of the small, but in a life of truth, 
and in the inexpugnable citadel of his own soul, that 
a Byron’s or a Burns’s strength must lie. Let the 
great stand aloof from him, or know how to reverence 
him. Beautiful is the union of wealth with favour 
and furtherance for literature; like the costliest flower- 
jar enclosing the loveliest amaranth. Yet let not 
the relation be mistaken. A true poet is not one whom 
they can hire by money or flattery to be a minister 
of their pleasures, their writer of occasional verses, 
their purveyor of table-wit; he cannot be their men¬ 
ial, he cannot even be their partisan. At the peril of 
both parties, let no such union be attempted! Will 
a Courser of the Sun 1 work softly in the harness of a 
Dray-horse? His hoofs are of fire, and his path is 
through the heavens, bringing light to all lands: will 
he lumber on mud highways, dragging ale for earth¬ 
ly appetites, from door to door? 

67. But we must stop short in these considera¬ 
tions, which would lead us to boundless lengths. We 
had something to say on the public moral character 
of Burns; but this also we must forbear. We are far 
from regarding him as guilty before the world, as 
guiltier than the average; nay from doubting that 
he is less guilty than one of ten thousand. Tried at a 
tribunal far more rigid than that where the Plebiscite? 

Greek mythology, the chariot of the Sun-God was 
supposed to be drawn by semi-divine horses. 

2 Decrees, in ancient Rome, passed by the Plebs, or com¬ 
mon citizens; now applied, chiefly on the continent of 



92 


Carlyle's Essay on Burns 


of common civic reputations are pronounced, he has 
seemed to us even there less worthy of blame than of 
pity and wonder. But the world is habitually unjust 
in its judgments of such men; unjust on many 
grounds, of which this one may be stated as the sub¬ 
stance: It decides, like a law, by dead statutes; and 
not positively but negatively, less on what is done 
right, than on what is or is not done wrong. Not 
the few inches of deflection from the mathematical 
orbit, which are so easily measured, but the ratio of 
these to the whole diameter, constitutes the real aber¬ 
ration . 1 2 This orbit may be a planet’s, its diameter 
the breath of the solar system; or it may be a city 
hippodrome; nay the circle of ginhorse , 3 its diameter 
a score of feet or paces. But the inches of deflection 
only are measured: and it is assumed that the diam¬ 
eter of the ginhorse, and that of the planet, will yield 

Europe, to decisions made by appeal to the whole body of 
citizens. Here it seems to mean decisions by uninformed 
public opinion. 

‘’This figure recalls the fact that Carlyle began his career 
as a teacher of mathematics. He refers to the method of 
measuring the deviation — or apparent deviation — of a plan¬ 
et from the perfect ellipse of its orbit. A certain number 
of inches of deflection, will constitute a greater displacement 
or aberration when the orbit is small than w T hen the orbit 
is large. In the same way the sins and failures of a man 
must be measured in proportion to the complexities and 
diameter of his life. 

2 A ginhorse is a horse used for working a gin or mill; 
it is driven round and round in a circle. The comparison 

was probably suggested to Carlyle by a letter of Burns to 
George Thomson, quoted by Lockhart (p. 265) : “Do you 
think that the sober gin-horse routine of existence could 
inspire a man with life, and love, and joy — could fire him 
with enthusiasm, or melt him with pathos, equal to the 
genius of your book?” 



Carlyle's Essay on Burns 


93 


the same ratio when compared with them! Here 
lies the root of many a blind, cruel condemnation of 
Burnses, Swifts, Rousseaus, which one never listens 
to with approval. Granted the ship comes into har¬ 
bour with shrouds and tackle damaged; the pilot is 
blameworthy; he has not been all-wise and all-power¬ 
ful : but to know how blameworthy, tell us first wheth¬ 
er his voyage has been round the Globe, or only to 
Ramsgate and the Isle of Dogs. 

68. With our readers in general, with men of right 
feeling anywhere, we are not required to plead for 
Burns. In pitying admiration, he lies enshrined in 
all our hearts, in a far nobler mausoleum than that 
one of marble; neither will his Works, even as they 
are, pass away from the memory of men. While the 
Shakspeares and Miltons roll on like mighty rivers 
through the country of Thought, bearing fleets of 
traffickers and assiduous pearl-fishers on their waves; 
this little Valclusa Fountain 1 will also arrest our 
eye: for this also is of Nature’s own and most cun¬ 
ning workmanship, bursts from the depths of the 
earth, with a full gushing current, into the light of 
day; and often will the traveller turn aside to drink 
of its clear waters, and muse among its rocks and 
pines! 


X A famous spring in southern France, near Avignon, cele¬ 
brated in verse by Petrarch (1304-74)', an Italian poet and 
scholar. The contrast is not so much between Shakespeare 
or Milton and Petrarch as between the “mighty rivers” and 
the fountain in a secluded valley — Yalclusa meaning 
“closed valley.” 



QUESTIONS AND SUGGESTIONS 


Note the topic of each paragraph. Note how the 
author begins and ends each paragraph. Note tran¬ 
sition devices and connectives. 

The numbers prefixed to the questions are those of 
the paragraphs to which they refer. Attention is 
called to certain words that are useful for dictionary 
study. Carlyle uses words very exactly, but some¬ 
times in an unusual sense. Some of the words noted 
are interesting for their history or etymological sig¬ 
nificance. 

The main purpose of the questions is to stimulate 
thought and discussion. Some may suggest theme 
topics. 

1. How does Carlyle introduce his subject? What 
one of his characteristic ideas is found in this and 
the next paragraph? Look up aggravation, mauso¬ 
leum, posthumous. 

1-3. How does Carlyle arrange the first three para¬ 
graphs so as to connect them closely? 

3. Look up gauging. 

4. Look up multifarious, nervous in a compli¬ 
mentary sense. 

1-5. What main topic is discussed in these para¬ 
graphs ? 

3. Carlyle criticizes Dr. Currie for “the apologetic 
air” which he adopts towards Burns. Is there not 
some apology in Carlyle’s later treatment of Burns’s 
works ? 

5. Give in your own words Carlyle’s idea of what 
ought to be in a Biography. What men do you know 
of who would deserve such a study? Have any such 
studies been made of them? 

6-9. What main topic is discussed in these para¬ 

graphs? 



Carlyle's Essay on Burns 


95 


6. Look up arsenal , magazine. Why are modern 
magazines so called? 

7. Find a very elaborate and beautiful figure of 
speech in this paragraph. Explain its meaning. 

8. Why are poets more valuable to the world than 
conquerors ? 

9. Where does Carlyle return to the idea of Burns’s 
sympathy with Nature? Why does he discuss it in 
two separate places? What differences are there in 
the purpose and the method of the two discussions? 

Is there any inconsistency between the conclusion 
of this paragraph and what Carlyle says in paragraphs 
48 and 56? 

Look up supercilious; compare with highbrow. 

10. What is meant by saying that Burns’s poems 
were “mere occasional effusions?” Find some of them 
in this book that illustrate the point. Find in para¬ 
graph 11 a statement which implies that such poems 
are likely to be the best. Look up wanted (original 
sense). 

12. What contrast does Carlyle draw here between 
Burns and Byron? What resemblances between the 
two does he note in paragraphs 66 and 67? Find out 
something about the life and the poetry of Byron, and 
see whether Carlyle is accurate in what he says about 
him. 

13. What digression occurs in the paragraph? How 
does Carlyle show that he regards it as a digression? 
Why does he discuss the topic at all? 

14. What, according to Carlyle, is the proper sub¬ 
ject-matter for poetry? Find in Burns’s poems some 
examples of this kind of subject-matter. Can you give 
some examples of poems that deal with the kind of 
subject-matter disapproved by Carlyle and that you 
think are really good? Defend them. 


96 


Carlyle's Essay on Burns 


15. What does Carlyle mean by calling the poet 
“a vates, a seer”? (See paragraph 17.)) 

16. What does the phrase, “seeing the world,” usu¬ 
ally mean? What does Carlyle mean by it? Look up 
inscrutable. 

17. Look up instinct. 

18. In this paragraph Carlyle discusses those 
qualities of Burns's poetry which illustrate the “return 
to nature” characterizing the romantic movement of 
the late eighteenth century? What are these quali¬ 
ties? Which one does he give examples of in the 
next paragraph? 

20. Find in Robinson Crusoe a description that is 
“detailed, ample, and lovingly exact.” Look up gar¬ 
rulity, laconic pith. 

21. Read Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” and 
study it to get its central idea. The poem proves 
that Keats as well as Burns had vigorous ‘‘intellectual 
perceptions.” Look up predilection. 

i 22. What “far subtler things than the doctrine of 
association” are illustrated by the quotation from 
Burns’s letter? 

23. What part of this paragraph is on human 
life in general rather than on Burns? What reason 

/ is there for introducing these general remarks? 

24. What is the point of this paragraph and the 
preceding quotation? Read Matthew Arnold’s poem 
on “St. Brandan” for a parallel idea. 

25 and 26. When is Indignation a good thing? 
Find some of the right kind of Indignation in Burns’s 
poems. 

29. Look up caricature. 

30. What shows that at the beginning of this para¬ 
graph the author changes the subject? What has he 
been discussing in paragraphs 10-29? Look up evan¬ 
escent, genial (unusual sense). 


Carlyle’s Essay on Burns 


97 


30-34. What is discussed in these paragraphs? 
Divide this discussion into two parts. 

31. What does Carlyle mean by “the next day as 
the last,” etc., to the end of the sentence? 

32. If Carlyle were alive now, what would he think 
of our present-day popular songs? Compare some of 
them with Burns’s songs and with Shakespeare’s. 
Look up the origin of tawdry. 

33. Read some of Shakespeare’s songs; for ex¬ 
ample, those in the Golden Treasury. 

35. What subject is introduced in this paragraph? 
How is it led up to in the preceding paragraph? 

35. Read Gray’s “Elegy in a Country Church¬ 
yard,” and prove that it really does have a “local en¬ 
vironment,” and was “nourished by the affections 
which spring from a native soil.” Note especially 
that the fifteenth stanza originally contained the 
names of Cato, Tully, and Caesar, which were changed 
by the author to what? why? 

36. Study carefully the sentences beginning, “We 
hope there is a prejudice,” and the next one. What is 
meant by founding patriotism on prejudice? What 
ought it to be founded on? How can we love and 
“prize justly” other lands? Discuss specifically with 
reference to France, Germany, England, Italy, Japan, 
etc. What is meant by “the venerable structure of 
social and moral Life,” etc.? Discuss by specific ex¬ 
amples. What is meant by the briers and the roses 
that may grow up from “the roots .... in the very 
core of man’s being”? Look up indigenous. 

37. Give some examples of American literature 
that have “the true racy virtues of the soil and cli¬ 
mate.” What poet has been cabled “the American 
Burns”? Why? Do you think the comparison is a 
good one? 

38. This is a very long transition paragraph. 


98 


Carlyle's Essay on Burns 


What main topic is dismissed here, and what one is 
introduced? How much space is devoted to each in 
the Essay? 

Look up intercalated. 

39. What characteristics of youth did Burns re¬ 
tain throughout life? What fundamental ideas of 
Carlyle’s philosophy are introduced into this para¬ 
graph ? 

Look up cornucopia. 

40. Find the main idea of this paragraph discussed 
again in paragraph 67. Why does Carlyle put it in 
twice and at these two places? 

41. Note the emotion which Carlyle puts into this 
paragraph and its personal application to himself. 
Read, if possible, the first section, called “James Car¬ 
lyle,” in Carlyle's Reminiscences, giving Carlyle’s own 
picture of his father. 

Look up bates. 

42. What does Carlyle think about youthful dissi¬ 
pation? Discuss in detail what is meant by the sent¬ 
ence about Manhood and Necessity. 

Look up aberration. 

43. Discuss from this paragraph Carlyle’s idea of 
the proper attitude toward religion. What is meant 
by the sentence beginning “For now”? 

44. What topic is introduced in this paragraph? 
Where does it end? Why is the long quotation from 
Scott inserted in this section? What resemblance 
was there between Burns and Napoleon? 

45. What do we learn about Burns from Sir Wal¬ 
ter Scott’s reminiscences? What do we learn about 
Scott himself? 

Look up clownish. 

46. Why did Burns’s visit to Edinburgh do him 
“great and lasting injury”? 

Look up altercation. 


Carlyle's Essay on Burns 


99 


48. What main topic begins in this paragraph? 
We may regard this topic as concluded with para¬ 
graph 52 or as continuing to the break before para¬ 
graph 55. Discuss. 

50. How did the so-called “patrons of genius’' 
harm Burns? Could they have helped him? (See 
paragraphs 55 and 56). 

Look up assiduous (literal meaning). 

51. “His life has now lost its unity.” What unity 
ought it to have had? 

52. What does this paragraph reveal about Car¬ 
lyle’s nature? 

53. Explain the sentence beginning “Not as a 
hired soldier.” 

54. In what possible sense could madness be 
looked upon as a “gate of deliverance”? Note the 
beauty of sound and sense in the last sentence. 

55. What is the main topic of the rest of the 
Essay? Divide into three sections. 

Why is Patronage “twice cursed”? Why is Pride 
“inculcated and encouraged as the basis of our whole 
social morality”? 

Look up inculcate . 

56. How does the sentence beginning “Do men 
gather grapes” apply here? 

How can we “go and do otherwise” ? Be specific. 

57. How has the world generally received its great 
men? Why? What is the function of great men in 
the world? For further examples see the lives of 
Columbus, S. F. B. Morse, Galvani, Lavoisier, Lin¬ 
coln, etc. It is worth while to illustrate in some de¬ 
tail the notion that “The world receives a new idea 
with positive pain.” (Walter Bagehot) Good sub¬ 
jects for themes and oral compositions. 

58-61. These paragraphs contain some of Car¬ 
lyle’s most fundamental ideas. What are they? 


100 


Carlyle's Essay on Burns 


61. Why did Burns fail, while Locke, Milton, and 
Cervantes succeeded? Note the succession of figures 
of speech in this paragraph. What do they mean? 

62. What is the morality “of a mere worldly 
man”? What sort of “noble instinct” could raise one 
above it? What is meant by saying that “there is no 
temple in his understanding”? 

63. How can Poetry be Wisdom and Religion? 
Is all poetry such, even all true poetry? How about 
Shakespeare’s songs? Explain the meaning in de¬ 
tail of the last sentence. 

65. Carlyle exaggerates Byron’s advantages in or¬ 
der to contrast him with Burns. What handicaps 
did Byron suffer from? Which of the two poets had 
the better parents? 

66. What, according to this paragraph, is the true 
function of a poet? Note the succession of figures 
of speech. Explain in detail the figure in the last two 
sentences, and show how it applies to Burns. 

Look up inexpugnable. 

67. What do you think of the idea that a man of 
genius should be judged more leniently than other 
men? 

68. Note the beauty and elaborate consistency of 
the concluding figure of speech. What is meant by 
saying that “the Shakspeares and Miltons” bear 
“fleets of traffickers and assiduous pearl-fishers on 
their waves”? 

For general questions on the Essay see the last 
part of the introduction. If the class has studied 
Edgar Allan Poe, an interesting comparison might 
be made between him and Burns as to details of their 
lives, their treatment by the public, and their posthu¬ 
mous fame. 


Selections from the Poetry 

of 


Robert Burns 





















SUGGESTIONS TO TEACHERS 


For the Study of the Poetry of Burns 

Burns’s poetry is eminently suitable in subject-mat¬ 
ter and style to pupils of high school age. Difficul¬ 
ties of language should be minimized as far as pos¬ 
sible. The class discussion should never degenerate 
into a questioning on the meanings of words. Where 
the peculiar form is merely spelled differently from 
the standard form or abbreviated from it, the pupil 
should be expected to understand it. (See notes at 
beginning of Glossary.) Pronounce according to re¬ 
quirements of rhyme and rhythm; otherwise read 
like ordinary English. Genuine “sing-song” reading 
of the songs should be encouraged. If possible, the 
class should actually sing or hear sung Sweet Afton, 
Ye Flowery Banks , or some of the other songs, like 
Auld Lang Syne. There is another, less poetic, but 
more popular version of Ye Flowery Banks, begin¬ 
ning “Ye banks and braes o’ bonnie Doon,” which is 
more commonly found set to music. Vol. IV of the 
Centenary Edition of Burns, edited by Henley and 
Henderson, contains a considerable number of Burns’s 
songs with the music. They can also be found in 
numerous song collections. Several of them are avail¬ 
able in phonograph records by good singers. Victor 
Records include the following: 64105 Auld Lang Syne; 
64427 Bonnie Wee Thing; 87005 Comin ’ Through the 
Rye (Farrar) ; 64422 Same (Gluck) ; 45132 Sweet 
Afton; 17366 John Anderson, My Jo; 54321 Red, Red 
Rose; 16062 Scots, Wha Hae; 87062 Ye Banks and 
Braes o’ Bonnie Doon . 

(The prints of the Burns and Oarljde cottages reproduced 
in this book may be purchased from the Thompson Publishing 
Company, Syracuse, New York. Blue prints are two cents 
each : 4 by 5 black and white prints, fifteen cents each ; 8 by 
10 black and white prints, fifty cents each, postage extra.) 


104 


Selections From Burns's Poems 



BIRTHPLACE OF ROBERT BURRNS, ALLOWAY 


















THE COTTER’S SATURDAY NIGHT 

Inscribed to R. Aiken, Esq. 

Let not Ambition mock their useful toil, 

Their homely joys, and destiny obscure; 

Nor Grandeur hear, with a disdainful smile, 
The short and simple annals of the poor. 

—GRAY 


I. 

My lov’d, my honor’d, much respected friend! 

No mercenary bard his homage pays; 

With honest pride, I scorn each selfish end, 

My deerest meed, a friend’s esteem and praise: 
To you I sing, in simple Scottish lays, 

The lowly train in life’s sequester’d scene; 

The native feelings strong, the guileless ways; 

What Aiken in a cottage would have been; 

Ah! tho’ his worth unknown, far happier there I 
ween! 


II. 

November chill blaws loud wi’ angry sugh; 

The short’ning winter-day is near a close; 

The miry beasts retreating frae the pleugh; 

The black’ning trains o’ craws to their repose: 
The toil-worn Cotter frae his labor goes— 

This night his weekly moil is at an end, 

Collects his spades, his mattocks, and his hoes, 
Hoping the morn in ease and rest to spend, 

And weary, o’er the moor, his course does hameward 


At length his lonely cot appears in view. 
Beneath the shelter of an aged tree; 


106 Selections From Burns's Poems 

Th’ expectant wee-things, toddlin’, stacher through 
To meet their dad, wi’ flichterin’ noise and glee. 
His wee bit ingle, blinkin bonilie, 

His clean hearth-stane, his thrifty wifie’s smile, 

The lisping infant, prattling on his knee, 

Does a’ his weary kiaugh and care beguile, 

And makes him quite forget his labor and his toil. 

IV. 

Belyve, the elder bairns come drapping in, 

At service out, amang the farmers roun’; 

Some ca’ the pleugh, some herd, some tentie rin 
A cannie errand to a neebor town: 

Their eldest hope, their Jenny, woman grown, 

In youthfu’ bloom, love sparkling in her e’e, 

Comes hame; perhaps, to shew a braw new gown, 
Or deposite her sair-won penny-free, 

To help her parents dear, if they in hardship be. 

V. 

With joy unfeign’d, brothers and sisters meet, 

And each for other’s weelfare kindly spiers: 

The social hours, swift-wing’d, unnotic’d fleet; 

Each tells the uncos that he sees or hears. 

The parents partial eye their hopeful years; 
Anticipation forward points the view; 

The mother, wi’ her needle and her sheers, 

Gars auld claes look amaist as weel’s the new; 

The father mixes a’ wi’ admonition due. 

VI. 

Their master’s and their mistress’s command 
The younkers a’ are warned to obey; 

And mind their labours wi’ an eydent hand, 

And ne’er, tho’ out o’ sight, to jauk or play: 

‘And 0! be sure to fear the Lord alway, 

And mind your duty, duly, morn and night; 

Lest in temptation’s path ye gang astray, 


Cotter's Saturday Night 


107 


Implore His counsel and assisting might: 

They never sought in vain that sought the Lord 
aright.' 

VII. 

But hark! a rap comes gently to the door; 

Jenny, wha kens the meaning o’ the same, 

Tells how a neebor lad came o’er the moor, 

To do some errands, and convoy her hame. 

The wily mother sees the conscious flame 
Sparkle in Jenny’s e’e, and flush her cheek; 

With heart-struck anxious care, enquires his name. 
While Jenny hafflins is afraid to speak; 

Weel-pleas’d the mother hears, it’s nae wild, worth¬ 
less rake. 


VIII. 

With kindly welcome, Jenny brings him ben; 

A strappin’ youth, he takes the mother’s eye; 
Blythe Jenny sees the visit’s no ill taen; 

The father cracks of horses, pleughs, and kye. 

The youngster’s artless heart o’erflows wi’ joy, 
But blate and laithfu’, scarce can weel behave; 

The mother, wi’ a woman’s wiles, can spy 
What makes the youth sae bashfu’ and sae grave; 
Weel-pleas’d to think her bairn’s respected like the 
lave. 


IX. 

0 happy love! where love like this is found: 

0 heart-felt raptures! bliss beyond compare! 

I’ve paced much this weary, mortal round, 

And sage experience bids me this declare:— 

Tf Heaven a draught of heavenly pleasure spare, 
One cordial in this melancholy vale, 

’Tis when a youthful, loving, modest pair, 

In other’s arms, breathe out the tender tale 


108 Selections From Burns's Poems 


Beneath the milk-white thorn that scents the ev’ning 
gale.’ 

X. 

Is there, in human form, that bears a heart, 

A wretch! a villain! lost to love and truth! 

That can, with studied, sly, ensnaring art, 

Betray sweet Jenny’s unsuspecting youth? 

Curse on his perjur’d arts! dissembling, smooth! 
Are honour, virtue, conscience, all exil’d? 

Is there no pity, no relenting ruth, 

Points to the parents fondling o’er their child? 

Then paints the ruin’d maid, and their distraction 
wild? 

XI. 

But now the supper crowns their simple board, 

The healsome parritch, chief o’ Scotia’s food; 

The soupe their only hawkie does afford, 

That, ’yont the hallan snugly chows her cood; 
The dame brings forth, in complimental mood, 

To grace the lad, her weelhain’d kebbuck, fell; 

And aft he’s prest, and aft he ca’s it guid; 

The frugal wifie, garrulous, will tell, 

How ’twas a towmond auld, sin’ lint was i’ the bell. 

XII. 

The chearfu’ supper done, wi’ serious face, 

They, round the ingle, form a circle wide; 

The sire turns o’er, wi’ patriarchal grace, 

The big ha’-Bible, ance his father’s pride. 

His bonnet rev’rently is laid aside, 

His lyart haffets wearing thin and bare; 

Those strains that once did sweet in Zion glide, 
He wales a portion with judicious care, 

And ‘Let us worship God!’ he says, with solemn air. 


Cotter's Saturday Night 


109 


XIII. 

They chant their artless notes in simple guise, 
They tune their hearts, by far the noblest aim; 
Perhaps Dundee's wild-warbling measures rise, 
Or plaintive Martyrs, worthy of the name; 

Or noble Elgin beets the heaven-ward flame, 

The sweetest far of Scotia’s holy lays: 

Compar’d with these, Italian trills are tame; 

The tickl’d ears no heart-felt raptures raise; 

Nae unison hae they, with our Creator’s praise. 1 2 

XIV- 

The priest-like father reads the sacred page. 

How Abram was the friend of God on high: 

Or, Moses bade eternal warfare wage 
With Amalek’s ungracious progeny; 

Or, how the royal Bard did groaning lie 
Beneath the stroke of Heaven’s avenging ire;* 

Or Job’s pathetic plaint, and wailing cry; 

Or rapt Isaiah’s wild, seraphic fire; 

Or other holy Seers that tune the sacred lyre. 

XV. 

Perhaps the Christian volume is the theme: 

How guiltless blood for guilty man was shed; 
How He, who bore in Heaven the second name, 
Had not on earth whereon to lay His head; 

How His first followers and servants sped; 

The precepts sage they wrote to many a land: 

How he, who lone in Patmos banished, 

Saw in the sun a mighty angel stand, 

And heard great Bab’lon’s doom pronounc’d by 
Heaven’s command. 3 


^he proper names in this stanza are those of hymn-tunes. 

2 David, who was both king and poet, was punished for 

his sins. 



110 Selections From Burns's Poems 


XVI. 

Then kneeling down to Heaven’s Eternal King, 

The saint, the father, and the husband prays: 
Hope ‘springs exulting on triumphant wing,’ 1 
That thus they all shall meet in future days, 

There, ever bask in uncreated rays, 

No more to sigh or shed the bitter tear, 

Together hymning their Creator’s praise, 

In such society, yet still more dear; 

While circling Time moves round in an eternal sphere. 

XVII. 

Compar’d with this, how poor Religion’s pride, 

In all the pomp of method, and of art; 

When men display to congregations wide 
Devotion’s ev’ry grace, except the heart 
The Power, incens’d, the pageant will desert, 

The pompous strain, the sacerdotal stole: 

But haply, in some cottage far apart, 

May hear, wellpleas’d, the language of the soul, 
And in His Book of Life the inmates poor enroll. 

XVIII. 

Then homeward all take off their sev’ral way; 

The youngling cottagers retire to rest: 

The parent-pair their secret homage pay, 

And proffer up to Heaven the warm request, 

That He who stills the raven’s clam’rous nest, 
And decks the lily fair in flow’ry pride, 

Would, in the way His wisdom sees the best, 

For them and for their little ones provide; 

But, chiefly, in their hearts with Grace Divine preside. 


defers to the Apocalypse or Revelation of St. John, the 
last book in the Bible, 

*Burns made a note that he took this from Pope’s Winfc 
sor Forest . It is there applied to the flight of a pheasant. 



Cotter's Saturday Night 


111 


XIX. 

From scenes like these, old Scotia’s grandeur springs, 
That makes her lov’d at home, rever’d abroad: 
Princes and lords are but the breath of kings, 

‘An honest man’s the noblest work of God’; 1 
And certes, in fair Virtue’s heavenly road, 

The cottage leaves the palace far behind; 

What is a lordling’s pomp? a cumbrous load, 
Disguising oft the wretch of human kind, 

Studied in arts of Hell, in wickedness refin’d! 

XX. 

0 Scotia! my dear, my native soil! 

For whom my warmest wish to Heaven is sent! 
Long may thy hardy sons of rustic toil 

Be blest with health, and peace, and sweet content! 
And 0! may Heaven their simple lives prevent 
From Luxury’s contagion, weak and vile! 

Then, howe’er crowns and coronets be rent, 

A virtuous populace may rise the while, 

And stand a wall of fire around their much-lov’d Isle. 

XXI. 

0 Thou! who pour’d the patriotic tide, 

That stream’d thro’ Wallace’s undaunted heart, 
Who dar’d to, nobly, stem tyrannic pride, 

Or nobly die, the second glorious part: 

(The patriot’s God, peculiarly Thou art, 

His friend, inspirer, guardian, and reward!) 

0 never, never Scotia’s realm desert; 

But still the patriot, and the patriot-bard 
In bright succession raise, her ornament and guard! 


Trom Pope’s Essay on Man, IV, 247. 



TAM O’ SHANTER 
A Tale 

Of Brownyis and of Bogillis full is this Buke. 

—GAWIN DOUGLAS 

When chapman billies leave the street, 

And drouthy neebors neebors meet; 

As market-days are wearing late, 

An’ folk begin to tak the gate; 

While we sit bousing at the nappy, 

An’ getting fou and unco happy, 

We think na on the lang Scots miles. 

The mosses, waters, slaps, and styles, 

That lie between us and our hame, 

Whare sits our sulky, sullen dame, 

Gathering her brows like gathering storm, 

Nursing her wrath to keep it warm. 

This truth fand honest Tam o’Shanter , 1 
As he frae Ayr ae night did canter: 

(Auld Ayr, wham ne’er a town surpasses, 

For honest men and bonie lasses). 

i Tiie rollowing note is from the Centenary Edition of 
Burns, I, 437: “Probably Burns drew the suggestion of his 
hero, Tam o’ Shanter, from the character and adventures 
of Douglas Graham. . . son of Robert Graham, farmer at 
Douglastown, tenant of the farm of Shanter on the Carrick 
Shore, and owner of a boat which he had named Tam o’ 
Shanter . Graham was noted for his convivial habits, which 
his wife’s ratings tended rather to confirm than to eradi r 
cate. Tradition relates that once, when his long-tailed 
grey mare had waited even longer than usual for her 
master at the tavern door, certain humourists plucked her 
tail to such an extent as to leave it little better than a 
stump, and that Graham, on his attention being called to 
its state next morning, swore that it had been depilated 
by the witches at Alloway Kirk.” 



Tam 0’ Shantek 


113 


0 Tam, had’st thou but been sae wise, 

As taen thy ain wife Kate’s advice! 

She tauld thee weel thou was a skellum, 

A blethering, blustering, drunken blellum; 
That frae November till October, 

Ae market-day thou was nae sober; 

That ilka melder wi’ the miller, 

Thou sat as lang as thou had siller; 

That ev’ry naig was ca’d a shoe on, 

The smith and thee gat roaring fou on; 
That at the Lord’s house, even on Sunday, 
Thou drank wi’ Kirkton Jean till Monday. 
She prophesied, that, late or soon, 

Thou would be found deep drown’d in Doon, 
Or catch’d wi’ warlocks in the mirk 
By Alloway’s auld, haunted kirk. 1 
Ah! gentle dames, it gars me greet, 

To think how monie counsels sweet, 

How monie lengthen’d, sage advices 
The husband frae the wife despises! 

But to our tale:—Ae market-night, 

Tam had got planted unco right, 

Fast by an ingle, bleezing finely, 

Wi’ reaming swats, that drank divinely; 
And at his elbow, Souter Johnie, 

His ancient, trusty, drouthy cronie: 

Tam lo’ed him like a very brither; 

They had been fou for weeks thegither. 

The night drave on wi’ sangs and clatter: 
And ay the ale was growing better: 

The landlady and Tam grew gracious 
Wi’ secret favours, sweet and precious: 


x The ruined church of Alloway and the bridge over the 
Doon referred to in the latter part of the poem are both 
very near Burns’s birthplace. 



114 Selections From Burns's Poems 


The Souter tauld his queerest stories; 

The landlord’s laugh was ready chorus: 

The storm without might rair and rustle, 

Tam did na mind the storm a whistle. 

Care, mad to see a man sae happy, 

E’en drown’d himself-amang the nappy. 

As bees flee hame wi’ lades o’ treasure, 

The minutes wing’d their way wi’ pleasure: 
Kings may be blest but Tam was glorious, 
O’er a’ the ills o’ life victorious! 

But pleasures are like poppies spread: 

You seize the flow’r, its bloom is shed; 

Or like the snow falls in the river, 

A moment white—then melts for ever; 

Or like the borealis race, 

That flit ere you can point their place; 

Or like the rainbow’s lovely form 
Evanishing amid the storm. 

Nae man can tether time or tide; 

The hour approaches Tam maun ride: 

That hour, o’ night’s black arch the key-stane, 
That dreary hour Tam mounts his beast in; 
And sic a night he taks the road in, 

As ne’er poor sinner was abroad in. 

The wind blew as ‘twad blawn its last; 

The rattling showers rose on the blast; 

The speedy gleams the darkness swallow’d; 
Loud, deep, and lang the thunder bellow’d: 
That night a child might understand, 

The Deil had business on his hand. 

Weel mounted on his gray mare Meg, 

A better never lifted leg, 

Tam skelpit on thro’ dub and mire, 


Tam O’ Shanter 


115 


Despising wind, and rain, and fire; 

Whiles holding fast his guid blue bonnet, 
Whiles crooning o’er some auld Scots sonnet, 
Whiles glow’ring round wi’ prudent cares, 
Lest bogles catch him unawares: 
Kirk-Alloway was drawing nigh, 

Whare ghaists and houlets nightly cry. 

By this time he was cross the ford, 

Whare in the snaw the chapman smoor’d; 
And past the birks and meikle stane, 

Whare drunken Charlie brak’s neck-bane; 
And thro’ the whins, and by the cairn, 
Whare hunters fand the murder’d bairn; 

And near the thorn, aboon the well, 

Whare Mungo’s mither hang’d hersel. 

Before him Doon pours all his floods; 

The doubling storm roars thro’ the woods; 
The lightnings flash from pole to pole; 

Near and more near the thunders roll: 

When, glimmering thro’ the groaning trees, 
Kirk-Alloway seem’d in a bleeze, 

Thro’ ilka bore the beams were glancing, 

And loud resounded mirth and dancing. 

Inspiring bold John Barleycorn, 

What dangers thou canst make us scorn! 

Wi’ tippenny, we fear nae evil; 

Wi’ usquabae, we’ll face the Devil! 

The swats sae ream’d in Tammie’s noddle, 
Fair play, he car’d na deils a boddle. 

But Maggie stood, right sair astonish’d, 

Till, by the heel and hand admonish’d, 

She ventur’d forward on the light; 

And, vow! Tam saw an unco sight! 


116 Selections From Burns's Poems 


Warlocks and witches in a dance: 

Nae cotillion, brent new frae France, 

But hornpipes, jigs, strathspeys, and reels, 

Put life and mettle in their heels. 

A winnock-bunker in the east, 

There sat Auld Nick, in shape o’ beast; 

A tousie tyke, black, grim, and large, 

To gie them music was his charge: 

He screw’d the pipes and gart them skirl, 

Till roof and rafters a’ did dirl. 

Coffins stood round, like open presses, 

That shaw’d the dead in their last dresses; 
And, by some devilish cantraip sleight, 

Each in its cauld hand held a light: 

By which heroic Tam was able 
To note upon the haly table, 

A murderer’s banes, in gibbet-airns; 

Twa span-lang, wee, unchristen’d bairns; 

A thief new-cutted frae a rape— 

Wi’ his last gasp his gab did gape; 

Five tomahawks wi’ bluid red-rusted; 

Five scymitars wi’ murder crusted; 

A garter which a babe had strangled; 

A knife a father’s throat had mangled— 
Whom his ain son o’ life bereft— 

The grey-hairs yet stack to the heft; 

Wi’ mair of horrible and awefu’ 

Which even to name wad be unlawfu’. 

As Tammie glowr’d, amaz’d, and curious, 

The mirth and fun grew fast and furious; 
The piper loud and louder blew, 

The dancers quick and quicker flew, 

They reel’d, they set, they cross’d, they cleekit, 
Till ilka carlin swat and reekit. 

And coost her duddies to the wark, 

And linket at it in her sark! 



Tam O’ Shanter 


117 


Now, Tam, 0 Tam! had thae been queans, 
A’ plump and strapping in their teens! 
Their sarks, instead o’ creeshie flannen, 
Been snaw-white seventeen hunder linen!— 1 
Thir breeks o’ mine, my only pair, 

That ance were plush, o’ guid blue hair, 

I wad hae gi’en them off my hurdies 
For ae blink o’ the bonie burdies! 

But wither’d beldams, auld and droll, 
Rigwoodie hags wad spean a foal, 

Louping and flinging on a crummock, 

I wonder did na turn thy stomach! 

But Tam kend what was what fu’ brawlie: 
There was ae winsome wench and wawlie, 
That night enlisted in the. core, 

Lang after kend on Carrick shore 
(For monie a beast to dead she shot, 

An’ perish’d monie a bonie boat, 

And shook baith meikle corn and bear. 

And kept the country-side in fear). 

Her cutty sark, o’ Paisley harn, 

That while a lassie she had worn, 

In longitude tho’ sorely scanty, 

It was her best, and she was vauntie . . .* 
Ah! little kend thy reverend grannie, 

That sark she coft for her wee Nannie, 

Wi’ twa pund Scots (’twas a’ her riches), 
Wad ever grac’d a dance of witches! 

But here my Muse her wing maun cour, 

Sic flights are far beyond her power: 

To sing how Nannie lap and flang 
(A souple jade she was and strang), 

And how Tam stood like ane bewitch’d, 


'Very fine linen with 1700 threads to a breadth. 



118 Selections From Burns's Poems 


And thought his very een enriched; 

Even Satan glowr’d, and fidg’d fu’ fain, 
And hotch’d and blew wi’ might and main; 
Till first ae caper, syne anither, 

Tam tint his reason a’ theigither, 

And roars out: ‘Weel done, Cuttysark!’ 
And in an instant all was dark; 

And scarcely had he Maggie rallied, 

When out the hellish legion sallied. 

As bees bizz out wi’ anggry fyke, 

WTien plundering herds assail their byke; 
As open pussie’s mortal foes, 

When, pop! she starts before their nose; 
As eager runs the market-crowd, 

When ‘Catch the thief!’ resounds aloud: 

So Maggie runs, the witches follow, 

Wi’ monie an eldritch skriech and hollo. 

Ah, Tam! Ah, Tam! thou’ll get thy fairin ! * 2 
In hell theyl’l roast thee like a herrin! 

In vain thy Kate awaits thy comin! 

Kate soon will be a woefu’ woman! 

Now, do thy speedy utmost, Meg, 

And win the key-stane of the brig; 

There, at them thou thy tail may toss, 


a The dots do not indicate an omission, but are in the 
original. 

2 Note from the Centenary Edition of Burns: “Literally 
a present from a fair. It was long a custom, of peasants 
returning from the fair to throw bags of confectionery tc 
children. This was the children’s ‘fairin.’ But the wore 
came to be used, as here, sarcastically, to signify a beat 
ing.” 



Selections From Burns’s Poems 119 


A running stream they dare na cross!’ 1 
But ere the key-stane she could make, 
The fient a tail she had to shake; 

For Nannie, far before the rest, 

Hard upon noble Maggie prest, 

And flew at Tam wi’ furious ettle; 

But little wist she Maggie’s mettle! 

Ae spring brought off her master hale, 
But left behind her ain grey tail: 

The carlin claught her by the rump, 
And left poor Maggie scarce a stump. 

Now, wha this tale o’ truth shall read, 
Ilk man, and mother’s son, take heed: 
Whene’er to drink you are inclin’d, 

Or cutty sarks run in your mind, 
Think! ye may buy the joys o’er dear: 
Remember Tam o’ Shanter’s mare. 


Un the edition of 1793 and 1794, Burns inserted this 
note: “It is a well-known fact that witches, or any evil 
spirits, have no power to follow a poor wight any farther 
than the middle of the next running stream. It may be 
proper likewise to mention to the benighted traveller, that 
when he falls in with bogles, whatever danger may be in 
his going forward, there is much more hazard in turning 
back.” 



TO A MOUSE 


ON TURNING HER UP IN HER NEST WITH THE PLOUGH, 
NOVEMBER 1785 

I. 

Wee, sleekit, cowrin, tim’rous beastie, 

0, what a panic’s in thy breastie! 

Thou need na start awa sae hasty 
Wi’ bickering brattle! 

I wad be laith to rin an’ chase thee, 

Wi’ murdering pattle! 


II. 

I’m truly sorry man’s dominion 
Has broken Nature’s social union, 

An’ justifies that ill opinion 
Which makes thee startle 
At me, thy poor, earth-born companion 
An’ fellow mortal! 

III. 

I doubt na, whyles, but thou may thieve; 
What then? poor beastie, thou maun live! 
A daimen icker in a thrave 
’S a sma’ request; 

I’ll get a blessin wi’ the lave, 

An’ never miss’t! 


IV. 

Thy wee-bit housie, too, in ruin! 

Its silly wa’s the win’s are strewin! 
An’ naething, now, to big a new ane, 
0’ foggage green! 

An’ bleak December’s win’s ensuin, 
Baith snell an’ keen! 


To A Mouse 


121 


v. 

Thou saw the fields laid bare an’ waste, 

An’ weary winter comin fast, 

An’ cozie here, beneath the blast, 

Thou thought to dwell, 

Till crash! the cruel coulter past 
Out thro' thy cell. 

VI. 

That wee bit heap o’ leaves an’ stibble, 

Has cost thee monie a weary nibble ! 

Now thou’s turned out, for a’ thy trouble, 
But house or hald, 

To thole the winter’s sleety dribble, 

An’ cranreuch cauld! 

VII. 

But Mousie, thou art no thy lane, 

In proving foresight may be vain: 

The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men 
Gang aft agley, 

An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain, 
For promis’d joy! 

VIII. 

Still thou art blest, compared wi’ me! 

The present only touches thee: 

But och! I backward cast my e’e, 

On prospects drear! 

An’ forward, tho’ I canna see, 

I guess an’ fear! 




TO A MOUNTAIN DAISY 

ON TURNING ONE DOWN WITH THE PLOUGH 
IN APRIL 1786 

I. 

Wee, modest, crimson-tipped flow’r, 

Thou’s met me in an evil hour; 

For I maun crush amang the stoure 
Thy slender stem: 

To spare thee now is past my pow’r, 

Thou bonie gem. 

II. 

Alas! it’s no thy neebor sweet, 

The bonie lark, companion meet, 

Bending thee ’mang the dewy weet, 

Wi’ spreckled breast! 

When upward-springing, blythe, to greet 
The purpling east. 

III. 

Cauld blew the bitter-biting north 
Upon thy early, humble birth: 

Yet cheerfully thou glinted forth 
Amid the storm, 

Scarce rear’d above the parent-earth 
Thy tender form. 

IV. 

The flaunting flow’rs our gardens yield. 

High shelt’ring woods and wa’s maun shield 
But thou, beneath the random bield 
O’ clod or stane, 

Adorns the histie stibble-field. 

Unseen, alane. 


To a Mountain Daisy 


123: 


v. 

There, in thy scanty mantle clad, 

Thy snawie bosom sun-ward spread, 

Thou lifts thy unassuming head 
In humble guise; 

But now the share uptears thy bed, 

And low thou lies! 

VI. 

Such is the fate of artless maid, 

Sweet flow’ret of the rural shade! 

By love’s simplicity betray’d, 

And guileless trust; 

Till she, like thee, all soil’d, is laid 
Low i’ the dust. 

VII. 

Such is the fate of simple Bard, 

On Life’s rough ocean luckless starr’d! 
Unskilful he to note the card 
Of prudent lore. 

Till billows rage, and gales blow hard, 

And whelm him o’er! 

VIII. 

Such fate to suffering Worth is giv’n, 

Who long with wants and woes has striv’n, 
By human pride or cunning driv’n 
To mis’ry’s brink; 

Till, wrench’d of ev’ry stay but Heav’n, 

He, ruin’d, sink! 

IX. 

Ev’n thou who mourn’st the Daisy’s fate, 
That fate is thine—no distant date; 

Stern Ruin’s plough-share drives elate. 

Full on thy bloom, 

Till crush’d beneath the furrow’s weight 
Shall be thy doom! 


POOR MAILIE’S ELEGY 1 

I. 

Lament in rhyme, lament in prose, 

Wi’ saut tears tricklin down your nose; 

Our Bardie’s fate is at a close, 

Past a’ remead! 

The last, sad cape-stane of his woes; 

Poor Mailie’s dead! 

II. 

It’s no the loss of warl’s gear. 

That could sae bitter draw the tear, 

Or mak our Bardie, dowie, wear 
The mourning weed: 

He’s lost a friend an’ neebor dear 
In Mailie dead. 

III. 

Thro’ a’ the toun she trotted by him; 

A lang half-mile she could descry him, 

Wi’ kindly bleat, when she did spy him, 
She ran wi’ speed: 

A friend mair faithfu’ ne’er cam nigh him, 
Than Mailie dead. 

IY. 

I wat she was a sheep o’ sense, 

An’ could behave hersel wi’ mense: 

I’ll say’t, she never brak a fence, 

Thro’ thievish greed. 

Our Bardie, lanely, keeps the spence 
Sin’ Mailie’s dead. 


1 “Poor Mailie,” the poet’s ewe, did not die at this time, 
hut was rescued from the ditch into which she had fallen 
as a result of becoming entangled with a rope; the elegy 
is purely imaginative. In the refrain of the poem pro¬ 
nounce dead to rhyme with weed. 



Poor Mailie's Elegy 


125 


V. 

Or, if he wanders up the howe, 

Her livin image in her yowe 

Comes bleatin till him, owre the knowe, 
For bits o’ bread; 

An’ down the briny pearls rowe 
For Mailie dead. 

VI. 

She was nae get o’ moorlan tips, 

Wi’ tawted ket, an’ hairy hips; 

For her forbears were brought in ships, 
Frae ’yont the Tweed: 

A bonier fleesh ne’er cross’d the clips 
Than Mailie’s dead. 

VII. 

Wae worth the man wha first did shape 

That vile, wanchancie thing—a rape! 

It maks guid fellows girn and gape, 

Wi’ chokin dread; 

An’ Robin’s bonnet wave wi’ crape 
For Mailie dead. 

VIII. 

0 a’ ye bards on bonie Doon! 

An’ wha on Ayr your chanters tune! 

Come, join the melancholious croon 
O’ Robin’s reed! 

His heart will never get aboon! 

His Mailie’s dead! 


YE FLOWERY BANKS 


I. 

Ye flowery banks o’ bonie Doon, 
How can ye blume sae fair? 
How can ye chant, ye little birds, 
And I sae fu’ o’ care? 


II. 

Thou’ll break my heart, thou bonie bird, 
That sings upon the bough: 

Thou minds me o’ the happy days 
When my fause Luve was true! 

III. 

Thou’ll break my heart, thou bonie bird, 
That sings beside thy mate: 

For sae I sat, and sae I sang, 

And wist na o’ my fate! 

IV. 

Aft hae I rov’d by bonie Doon 
To see the woodbine twine, 

And ilka bird sang o’ its luve, 

And sae did I o’ mine. 

V. 

Wi’ lightsome heart I pu’d a rose 
Frae aff its thorny tree, 

And my fause luver staw my rose, 

But left the thorn wi’ me. 


M’PHERSON’S FAREWELL 
Chorus 

Sae rantingly, sae wantonly, 

Sae dauntingly gaed he, 

He play’d a spring, and danc’d it round 
Below the gallows-tree.' 

I. 

Farewell, ye dungeons dark and strong:. 

The wretch’s destinie! 

M’Pherson’s time will not be long 
On yonder gallows-tree. 

II. 

0, what is death but parting breath? 

On many a bloody plain 
I’ve dar’d his face, and in this place 
I scorn him yet again! 

• III. 

Untie these bands from off my hands, 

And bring to me my sword, 

And there’s no a man in all Scotland 
But I’ll brave him at a word. 

IV. 

I’ve liv’d a life of sturt and strife; 

I die by treacherie: 

It burns my heart I must depart, 

And not avenged be. 

V. 

Now farewell light, thou sunshine bright, 
And all beneath the sky! 

May coward shame distain his name, 

The wretch that dare not die! 


A BARD'S EPITAPH 


I. 

Is there a whim-inspired fool, 

Owre fast for thought, owre hot for rule, 
Owre blate to seek, owre proud to snool?— 
Let him draw near; 

And owre this grassy heap sing dool, 

And drap a tear. 

II. 

Is there a Bard of rustic song, 

Who, noteless, steals the crowds among, 
That weekly this area throng Y— 

0, pass not by! 

But with a frater-feeling strong, 

Here, heave a sigh. 

III. 

Is there a man, whose judgment clear 
Can others teach the course to steer, 

Yet runs, himself, life's mad career 
Wild as the wave?— 

Here pause—and, thro’ the starting tear, 
Survey this grave. 

IV. 

The poor inhabitant below 

Was quick to learn and wise to know, 

And keenly felt the friendly glow 
And softer flame; 

But thoughtless follies laid him low, 

And stain’d his name. 

V. 

Reader, attend! whether thy soul 
Soars Fancy's flights beyond the pole, 



Selections From Burns's Poems 129 


Or darkling grubs this earthly hole 
In low pursuit; 

Know, prudent, cautious, self-control 
Is wisdom’s root. 




SCOTS, WHA HAE 

I. 

Scots, wha hae wi’ Wallace bled, 

Scots, wham Bruce has aften led, 
Welcome to your gory bed 
Or to victorie! 

II. 

Now’s the day, and now’s the hour: 

See the front o’ battle lour, 

See approach proud Edward’s power— 
Chains and slaverie! 

III. 

Wha will be a traitor knave? 

Wha can fill a coward’s grave? 

Wha sae base as be a slave?— 

Let him turn, and flee! 

IV. 

Wha for Scotland’s King and Law 
Freedom’s sword will strongly draw, 
Freeman stand or freeman fa’, 

Let him follow me! 

V. 

By Oppression’s woes and pains, 

By your sons in servile chains, 

We will drain our dearest veins 
But they shall be free! 

VI. 

Lay the proud usurpers low! 

Tyrants fall in every foe! 

Liberty’s in every blow! 

Let us do, or die! 1 


'Pronounce to rhyme with free. 



MY WIFE’S A WINSOME 
WEE THING 


Chorus 

She is a winsome wee thing, 

She is a handsome wee thing, 
She is a lo’esome wee thing, 

This sweet wee wife o’ mine! 

I. 

I never saw a fairer, 

I never lo’ed a dearer, 

And neist my heart I’ll wear her, 
For fear my jewel tine. 

II. 

The warld’s wrack, we share o’t; 
The warstle and the care o’t, 

Wi’ her I’ll blythely bear it, 

And think my lot divine. 

Chorus 

She is a winsome wee thing, 

She is a handsome wee thing, 

She is a lo’esome wee thing, 

This sweet wee wife o' mine. 


OF A’ THE AIRTS 

I. 

Of a’ the airts the wind can blaw 
I dearly like the west, 

For there the bonie lassie lives, 

The lassie I lo’e best. 

There wild woods grow, and rivers row, 
And monie a hill between, 

But day and night my fancy’s flight 
Is ever wi’ my Jean. 

II. 

I see her in the dewy flowers— 

I see her sweet and fair. 

I hear her in the tunefu’ birds— 

I hear her charm the air. 

There’s not a bonie flower that springs 
By fountain, shaw, or green, 

There’s not a bonie bird that sings, 

But minds me o’ my Jean. 


JOHN ANDERSON MY JO 


I. 

John Anderson my Jo, John, 
When we were first acquent, 
Your locks were like the raven, 
Your bonie brow was brent; 
But now your brow is beld, John, 
Your locks are like the snaw, 
But blessings on your frosty pow, 
John Anderson my jo! 

II. 

John Anderson my jo, John, 

We clamb the hill thegither, 
And monie a cantie day, John, 
We’ve had wi’ ane anither; 
Now we maun totter down, John, 
And hand in hand we’ll go, 

And sleep thegither at the foot, 
John Anderson my jo! 


I HAE A WIFE O’ MY AIN 


I. 

I hae a wife o’ my ain, 

I’ll partake wi’ naebody: 

I’ll take cuckold frae nane, 
I’ll gie cuckold to naebody. 

II. 

I hae a penny to spend, 

There—thanks to naebody: 

I hae naething to lend, 

I’ll borrow frae naebody. 

III. 

I am naebody's lord, 

I’ll be slave to naebody. 

I hae a guid braid sword, 

I'll tak dunts frae naebody. 

IV. 

I’ll be merry and free, 

I’ll be sad for naebody. 

Naebody cares for me, 

I care for naebody. 


SWEET AFTON 


I. 

Flow gently, sweet Afton, among thy green braes! 
Flow gently, I’ll sing thee a song in thy praise! 

My Mary’s asleep by thy murmuring stream— 

Flow gently, sweet Afton, disturb not her dream! 

II. 

Thou stock dove whose echo resounds thro’ the glen, 
Ye wild whistling blackbirds in yon thorny den, 

Thou green-crested lapwing, thy screaming forbear— 
I charge you, disturb not my slumbering fair! 

III. 

How lofty, sweet Afton, thy neighbouring hills, 

Far mark’d with the courses of clear, winding rills! 
There daily I wander, as noon rises high, 

My flocks and -my Mary’s sweet cot in my eye. 

IV. 

How pleasant thy banks and green vallies below, 
Where wild in the woodlands the primroses blow! 
There oft, as mild Ev’ning weeps over the lea, 

The sweet-scented birk shades my Mary and me. 

V. 

Thy crystal stream, Afton, how lovely it glides, 

And winds by the cot where my Mary resides! 

How wanton thy waters her snowy feet lave, 

As, gathering sweet flowerets, she stems thy clear 
wave! 


VI. 

Flow gently, sweet Afton, among thy green braes! 
Flow gently, sweet river, the theme of my lays! 
My Mary’s asleep by thy murmuring stream— 
Flow gently, sweet Afton, disturb not her dream! 


A RED, RED ROSE 

I 

0, my luve is like a red, red rose, 
That’s newly sprung in June. 

0, my luve is like the melodie, 
That’s sweetly play’d in tune. 

II. 

As fair art thou, my bonie lass, 

So deep in luve am I, 

And I will luve thee still, my dear, 
Till a’ the seas gang dry. 

III. 

Till a’ the seas gang dry, my dear, 
And the rocks melt wi’ the sun! 

And I will luve thee still, my dear, 
While the sands o’ life shall run. 

IV. 

And fare thee weel, my only luve, 
And fare thee weel a while! 

And I will come again, my luve, 
Tho’ it were ten thousand mile! 


HIGHLAND MARY 1 

I. 

Ye banks and braes and streams around 
The castle o’ Montgomery, 

Green be your woods, and fair your flowers, 
Your waters never drumlie! 

There Summer first unfald her robes, 

And there the langest tarry! 

For there I took the last fareweel 
O’ my sweet Highland Mary! 

II. 

How sweetly bloom’d the gay, .green birk, 
How rich the hawthorn’s blossom, 

As underneath their fragrant shade 
I clasp’d her to my bosom! 

The golden hours on angel wings 
Flew o’er me and my dearie: 

For dear to me as light and life 
Was my sweet Highland Mary. 

III. 

Wi’ monie a vow and lock’d embrace 
Our parting was fu’ tender; 


Tn a note to another poem on the same girl, called “My 
Highland Lassie,” Burns says that she was “a warm¬ 
hearted, charming young creature as ever blessed a man with 
generous love. After a pretty long tract of the most ardent 
reciprocal attachment, we met by appointment on the second 
Sunday of May, in a sequestered spot by the Banks of Ayr, 
where we spent the day in taking farewell, before she 
should embark for the West Highlands to arrange matters 
for our projected change of life. At the close of the Au¬ 
tumn following she crossed the sea to meet me at Greenock, 
where she had scarce landed when she was seized with a 
malignant fever, which hurried my dear girl to the grave 
in a few days, before I could even hear of her jllness.” 



158 Selections From Burns's Poems 


And, pledging aft to meet again, 

We tore oursels asunder. 

But 0, fell Death’s untimely frost, 

That nipt my flower sae early! 

Now green’s the sod, and cauld’s the ciay, 
That wraps my Highland Mary! 

IV. 

0, pale, pale now, those rosy lips 
1 aft hae kiss’d sae fondly; 

And clos’d for ay, the sparkling glance 
That dwalt on me sae kindly; 

And mouldering now in silent dust 
That heart that lo’ed me dearly! 

But still within my bosom’s core 
Shall live my Highland Mary. 


IS THERE FOR HONEST POVERTY 

I. 

Is there for honest poverty 

That hings his head, an’ a' that? 

The coward slave, we pass him by_ 

We dare be poor for a’ that! 

For a’ that, an’ a’ that, 

Our toils obscure, an’ a’ that, 

The rank is but the guinea’s stamp, 

The man’s the gowd for a’ that. 

II. 

What though on hamely fare we dine, 

Wear hoddin grey, an’ a’ that? 

Gie fools their silks, and knaves their wine— 
A man’s a man for a’ that. 

For a’ that, an’ a’ that, 

Their tinsel show, an’ a’ that, 

The honest man, tho’ e’er sae poor, 

Is king o’ men for a’ that. 

III. 

Ye see yon birkie ca’d l a lord/ 

Wha struts, an’ stares, an’ a’ that? 

Tho’ hundreds worship at his word, 

He’s but a cuif for a’ that. 

For a’ that, an’ a’ that, 

His ribband, star, an’ a’ that, 

The man o’ independent mind, 

He looks an’ laughs at a’ that. 

IV. 

A prince can mak a belted knight, 

A marquis, duke, an’ a’ that! 

But an honest man’s aboon his might— 

Guid faith, he mauna fa’ that! 

For a’ that, an’ a that. 


140 Selections From Burns’s Poems 


Their dignities, an’ a’ that, 

The pith o’ sense an’ pride o’ worth 
Are higher rank than a’ that. 

V. 

Then let us pray that come it may 
(As come it will for a’ that) 

That Sense and Worth o’er a’ the eartn 
Shall bear the gree an’ a’ that! 

For a’ that, an’ a’ that, 

It’s comin yet for a’ that, 

That man to man the world o’er 
Shall brithers be for a’ that. 


CA’ THE YOWES TO THE KNOWES 


Chorus 

Ca’ the yowes to the knowes, 

Ca’ them where the heather grows, 
Ca’ them where the burnle rowes, 

My bonie dearie. 

I. 

Hark, the mavis’ e’ening sang 
Sounding Clouden’s woods amang: 
Then a-faulding let us gang, 

My bonie dearie. 

II. 

We’ll gae down by Clouden side, 

Thro’ the hazels, spreading wide 
O’er the waves that sweetly glide 
To the moon sae clearly. 

III. 

Yonder Clouden’s silent towers 
Where at moonshine’s midnight hours, 
O’er the dewy bending flowers 
Fairies dance sae cheery. 

IV. 

Ghaist nor bogle shalt thou fear— 
Thou’rt to Love and Heav’n sae dear 
Nocht of ill may come thee near, 

My bonie dearie. 

Chorus 

Ca’ the yowes to the knowes, 

Ca’ them where the heather grows, 
Ca’ them where the burnle rowes. 

My bonie dearie. 



























































GLOSSARY 

Note: The Glossary omits all Scottish words that are 
like standard English except for having a, ai, an, or i, in 
place of o; for example, hald for hold, aff for off, stane for 
stone, cauld for cold, snawie for snowy, lang for long, 
baitli for both, mair for more, wha for who, brither for 
brother, ain for own, lades for loads. It also omits all 
words which have an apostrophe in place of a final d or l ; 
for example, win ’ for wind, a ’ for all, faithfu ’ for faithful. 

A 

aboon, above; to get aboon, to rejoice. 
acquent, acquainted. 
ae, one. 

agley, askew, astray. 
aiblins, perhaps. 
airts, directions. 
amaist, almost. 

amuck. The word amoq is a Malay adjective applied to a 
man or an animal in a fighting frenzy, it is used in 
English only in combination with run. To run amuck 
means to behave in a wild, headstrong fashion. 
ance, once. 
ane, one. 

Auld Nick, the devil. 
ay, ever, always. 

B 

Bacon, Roger (1219-1294) : an English Franciscan friar, 
one of the greatest of medieval scholars, who was impris¬ 
oned as a heretic and a sorcerer. 

Barleycorn, John: a nickname for whiskey or ale. 

Batteux (1709-1785) : a French critic of no great impor¬ 
tance 

bear, barley. 
held. bald. 

beldams, ugly old women. 


144 Selections From Burns's Poems 


belyve, by-and-by. 
ben, inside. 
bickering, hurrying. 
bield, shelter. 
big, build. 
billies, fellows. 
bing, heap. 

Birbeck, Morris: the author of a book published in 1818, 
Notes on a Journey in America, 
birkie, fellow. 
birks, birches. 
bizz, buzz. 
blate, shy, modest. 
bleeze, blaze; bleezing, blazing. 
blellum, babbler. 
blethering , chattering. 
blink, glimpse. 
bluid, blood. 
bocked, gushed. 

boddle, farthing. “Fair play, he car’d na deils a boddle,” 
=With fair play, he cared not a farthing for devils. 
bogles, bogies, specters or evil spirits. 

Boileau (1636-1,711) : a French poet and critic; very in¬ 
fluential in spreading the so-called classical theories of 
literary criticism. 

bonie, bonier: Burns’s spelling and common in Scotland 
for bonnie, bonnier, beautiful, more beautiful. 
bonnet, a Scotch cap worn by men, shaped like what is now 
known as a tam-o’-shanter, the name being derived from 
the poem. 
bore, chink, hole. 

Boreas: Greek god, of the north wind; hence, the wind 
itself. 

bousing, drinking. 
braes, slopes. 
brattle, scamper. 

braw, brave, but means handsome. 
brawlie, very well, excellently. 
breeks, breeches. 


Glossary 


145 


brent, straight. “Your bonie brow was brent”=not slo¬ 
ping back from baldness. 
brent new, brand new. 
bundles, maidens. 
burin, engraver’s tool. 
bums, little rivers. 
but, without. 

Butler, Samuel (1612-1680) : author of the satiric poem, 
Hudibras. He is said to have died in extreme poverty, 
though his poem was much admired by Charles II and 
his court. 
byke, hive. 

C 

ca\ call, but may mean drive or follow a plough or tend 
cattle. 

cairn, a pile of stones. 
callets, women (disrespectful). 

Camoens (1524-1580) : the greatest of Portugese poets. 
cannie, pleasant, quiet, cheerful. 
cantie. jolly. 

cantraip sleight, magic device. 

carlin, a disrespectful term for an old woman. 

chanters . bagpipes. 

chapman, merchant, especially traveling merchant or pedler. 

chows, chews. 

claes, clothes. 

clamb, climbed. 

claught, seized. 

cleekit, took hold. 

coft, bought. 

Coil, Lugar, Greenock, Garpal: rivers of Ayrshire. 
Constable’s Miscellany: Archibald Constable, publisher of 
the Edinburgh Review and of the Encyclopedia Britan- 
nica, died the year before this Essay was published in the 
Revieiv. His Miscellany was a series of standard works 
in small volumes. 
coost, cast off. 
core, corps, company. 
cour, stoop. 


146 Selections From Burns's Poems 


cracks, chats. 
cranreuch, hoarvfrost. 
creeshie, greasy. 

Crockford’s: a fashionable club in London. 
crummoclc, cudgel. 

cuckold, a nickname given to a man whose wife is unfaith¬ 
ful to him. To take or give cuckold is to take or give 
this nickname. 
cuif, dolt, fool. 
cutty, short. 

D 

daimen icker, odd ear. 

Defoe, Daniel (1661-1731) : author of Robinson Crusoe, etc. 
deil, devil. 

Delphi: the principal seat of the worship of Apollo, the 
ancient Greek god of the sun and of poetry. 
dinna, do not. 
dirl, ring (verb). 
distain, stain. 

dithyrambic, originally a passionate hymn sung in honor 
of the Greek god Dionysos; Carlyle uses it of a song 
presenting exalted and intense emotion. 
dool, grief. 

douce gudeman, sober and respectable man of the house. 

doure, hard and stubborn. 

dowie, drooping, sad. 

dribble, drizzle. 

drouthy, thirsty. 

Druids: priests belonging to the ancient inhabitants of the 
British Isles and of Western Europe. 
drumlie, turbid, muddy. 
dub, puddle. 
duddies , rags. 
dunts, blows. 

E 

e'e, eye; een, eyes. 
eldritch, unearthly. 
ettle, aim. 
eydent, diligent. 






Glossary 


147 


F 

fa\ fall, but “he mauna fa’ that”=he must not claim that. 
fand, found. 
fause, false. 

fient, fiend, but “the Sent a tail”=no tail at all. 

fell, biting, pungent. 

fidged, fidgeted. 

flang, flung. 

flannen, fannel. 

fleesh, fleece. 

flichterm ’, fluttering. 

foggage. coarse grass. 

fou, full, drunk. 

frae, from. 

frater-feeling, brotherly feeling. 
fyke, fret, disturbance. 


G 

gal), mouth. 
gaed, went. 

Galileo (1564-1642) : an Italian astronomer, who insisted 
that the world revolves around the sun and was put in 
prison until he denied the truth of this alleged heresy. 
Galloway: district in Southwestern Scotland. 
gang, go. 

gar, make, cause; past tense, gart. 
gate, road, way. (Compare gait). 

gibbet-aims, gibbet-irons: iron chains in which the dead 
bodies of criminals used to be hung up for a warning. 
gie, give. 
gim, grin. 

Glenbuck: the source of the river Ayr. 
glowr, stare (noun or verb). 
gowd, gold. 

gree, degree, prize, first place. 
guid, good. 

guidwife, goodwife, “lady of the house.” 
gumlie, muddy. 


hae , have. 


H 


148 Selections From Burns's Poems 


haffets, side-locks of hair. 

hafflinn, half. 

hained, saved. 

hale, whole. 

hallan, wall. 

ham, coarse cloth. 

hawkie, cow. 

hawking, crying articles for sale. 

healsome, wholesome. 

hersel, herself. 

hing, hang. 

histie, bare. 

hoddin grey, coarse grey woollen. 
hotched, jerked. 
houlets, owls. 
howe, glen. 

Hume, David (1711-1776) ; one of the greatest philsophers 
of the 18th century. 
hurdles, buttocks. 


I 

ilk, ilka, each, every. 
ingle, fireplace. 

in malam partem, a Latin phrase meaning ‘‘in bad part,” 
that is, with any unfavorable criticism. 

Isle of Dogs: in the Thames a few miles below London 
Bridge. 


J 

jad, jade, a humorous or contemptuous term for a young 
woman. 

jauk, trifle (verb). 

jaups, splashes. 

Jean Paul: Jean (or Johann) Paul Richter (1763-1825), a 
German poet and philosopher, whose influence on Car¬ 
lyle was great. 

K 

Karnes, Lord (1696-1782) : a Scottish judge, who wrote 
Elements of Criticism , 1762. 

kebbuck, cheese. 

k§n t know; keni, knew or known. 


Glossary 


149 


ket , fleece. 
kiaugk, anxiety. 
knowe, knoll. 
kye, cattle. 


L 

La Fleche: a French town, where Hume lived for some 
years. 

laitkfu', loathful, backward, diffident. 
lane, lone; ‘‘no thy lane”=not alone. 
lap, leaped. 

lave, the rest, what is left. 
lea, meadow. 
lea'e, leave. 

lift, sky: “far south the lift”=far south in the sky. 
linket, tripped. 

Unking, tripping. 

loadstar, a star used as a guide by mariners; usually the 
polar star. 
lo'ed, loved. 
louping, leaping. 

Lowe, Sir Hudson: the governor of St. Helena during 
Napoleon’s captivity on that island. 
lyart, grey. 

M 

Mably (1709)4785) : a French diplomat and statesman. 

maun, must; mauna, must not. 

meikle, large, much. 

melder, meal-grinding. 

mense, tact, good manners. 

Minerva Press: a London establishment, where cheap 
novels were printed in large numbers. 
mining, undermining. 
mirk, dark. 

modica, small quantities. 
monie or mony, many. 

Montesquieu (1689-1755): a French jurist; his book, The 
Spirit of the Laws, influenced political thinking all over 
Europe. 

mows, bogs, 

' 


150 Selections From Burns’s Poems 


N 

na, nae, not. 
naig, nag, horse. 
nappy , ale. 
neebor, neighbor. 
neist, next. 

Nickie-ben, nickname for the devil. 
no, not. 


O 

ony, any. 

ourie, shivering. 

ower, owre, over. 

P 

parritck, porridge. 

pattle, plough-staff. 

Phoebus: Greek god of the sun; another name for Apollo; 
used by Burns to mean the sun itself. 

pleugh, plough. 

Poussin, Nicolas (1594-1665) : a French painter of land¬ 
scapes and historical scenes. His painting, “The Deluge,” 
hangs in the Lonvre Museum at Paris. 

pow, pate. 

Propaganda Missionaries: Roman Catholic missionary 
priests sent out under what is called the Congregation 
of the Propaganda or Congregatio de Propaganda Fide 
at Rome. 

pund, pound; a ‘‘pund Scots” is worth less than one-tenth 
of an English pound. 


Q 

queans, girls. 

Quesnay (1694-1774) a French economist of great ability. 

R 

Rabelais, Francois (1495-1553) : a great French humorist 
and satirist. 

Racine (1639-1699) : the greatest writer of French classical 
tragedies. 

Ramsgate: a seaside resort near London. 


Glossary 


151 


rantingly , roltickingly. 
rancle, rough. 
ream , foam. 
reaming, foaming. 

red-wat-shod, wearing shoes wet and red with blood. The 
word occurs in Burns’s “Epistle to William Simpson 
of Ochiltree.” 
reekit, steamed. 
remead, remedy. 

Retzsch (1759-1857) : a German painter and engraver, who 
had illustrated the works of Carlyle’s favorite German 
authors, Goethe and Schiller. % 

ribband, ribbon. 

Richardson,, Samuel (1689-1761) : author of Clarissa Har- 
lowe and other novels; sometimes called the Father of 
the English Novel. 
rigwoodie, ancient and lean. 
rln, run. 

Robertson, William (1721-1793) : author of a well-known 
history of Chares Y. 

Rottonkey or Ratton-key: a small landing-place at the 
mouth of the Ayr. 
row, rowe, roll. 

S 

sae, so. 

sair, sore, hard, hardly, very, very much. 

sark, a chemise or long shirt. 

saut, salt. 

show, wood, grove. 

siller, silver, money. 

sic, such. 

sin', since. 

skellum, a good-for-nothing person. 
skelpit, ran noisily, slapped along. 
skirl, squeal (verb). 
skriech, screech. 

slaps, openings, breaks in fences or walls. 
sleekit, sleek. 


152 Selections From Burns’s Poems 


Smith, Adam (1723-1790) : a professor at Glasgow Univer¬ 
sity, author of The Wlealth of Nations and one of the 
founders of the science of political economy. 
smoored, smothered. 
snaw-broo, snow-brew, slushy water. 
snell, biting, bitter. 
snool, cringe. 
sonnet, song. 
soupe, milk. 
souple, supple. 
souter, cobbler. 

span-lang, as long as a span, that is, the distance over 
which the hand can be expanded. 
speat, spate, torrent, flood. 

spean a foal, disgust a colt so that it cannot eat. 
spence, parlor. 
spiers, asks. 

spring, a quick, lively tune. 
stacker, stagger, totter. 
stack, stuck. 
stake, chance. 
staw, stole. 

Sterne, Laurence (17134768) : an English humorist and 
sentimentalist, author of Tristram Shandy. 

Stewart, Dugald (1753-1828) : a Scotch philosopher, profes¬ 
sor at Edinburgh University. 
stiibble, stubble. 
stoure, dust. 

strathspey, a Scottish dance. 

sturt, trouble. 

sud, should. 

sugh, wail. 

swat, sweated. 

swats, new ale. 

syne , afterwards, since, then. 

T 

taen, taken. 

Tasso (1544-1595) : an Italian poet, imprisoned in a mad¬ 
house by the Duke of Ferrara, probably for daring to 
make love to the Duke's daughter. 


Glossary 


153 


tatterdemalions, ragged fellows. 
tawted, matted. 

Teniers : the name of two Flemish painters of the 17th 
century, both of whom painted tavern scenes and pic¬ 
tures of low life. 
tentie, heedful, attentive. 
thae, these. 

Theocritus: a Greek poet of the third century B. C.; his 
poems deal for the most part with idealized shepherds of 
Sicily; they are called “idyls,” that is, little pictures of 
country life. 
thir, these. 
thole , endure. 
thowes, thaws. 
throve, twenty'icfour sheaves. 

Tieck and Musiius: two German authors who used folk-lore 
and superstitions in their writings. 
till, to. 
tine, be lost. 
tint, lost. 

tippenny, ale costing twopence. 
tips, rams. 

Titan : one of a race of giants in Greek mythology, who 
were said to have piled Mount Ossa upon Mount Pelion 
in an attempt to scale Olympus and overthrow Zeus. 
Tophet: a valley near Jersualem, where the refuse of the 
city was thrown out and burnt; the name came to be a 
synonym for Hell. 
toun, farm. 
tousle, shaggy. 

towmound, twelvemonth, year. 

Tuileries: a palace in Paris, at that time the residence of 
of the French king; most of the palace was burned down 
in 1871, and the name is now used of the public gar¬ 
dens on its site. 
tyke, a dog. 


U 

unco, wondrous, unusually. 
uncos, wonders or strange things. 
unfald, unfold. 


154 Selections From Burns's Poems 


upo’, upon. 

usquabae, whiskey (the original form of the word, which 
is of Celtic origin). 

y 

vauntie, proud. 

Voltaire (1694-1778): a French critic, poet, and damatist; 
his influence on, European thought was very great. 

W 

wad, would, would have. 

wae, woe or woeful; wae worth, woe befall. 
wales, selects. 

wanchancie, dangerous. 
wanton, playful, playfully. 
warV, world. 
warlocks, wizards. 
warstle, wrestle. 

wassail, carousal, occasion for festivity. The word is from 
an Old English salutation used in drinking healths: “Wes 
hal” or “waes hael,” “be whole or well.” 
wat, know. 

wawlie, choice (adj.). 
wear, be worn. 
weel, well. 
weet, wet. 

whins, furze or gorse, spiny shrubs common in Scotland. 
whyles. sometimes. 
wi\ with. 

winnock-tunker, window-seat. 
wist, knew. 

Y 

'yont, beyond. 
yowe, ewe. 



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